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POEMS 



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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • EOSTON - CHICAGO 
SAN FKANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



POEMS 

BY 
MADISON CAWEIN 

(Selected by the Author) 



WITH 

A FOREWORD BY WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1911 

All rights reserved 



.Hi 



Copyright, igii, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 191 1. 



^1 



'^Mn 



J. S. CusMng Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



©CI.A297050 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE 

The verses composing this volume have been selected 
by the author almost entirely from the five-volume 
edition of his poems published by the Bobbs-Merrill 
Company in 1907. A number have been included from 
the three or four volumes which have been published 
since the appearance of the Collected Poems ; namely, 
three poems from the volume entitled ''Nature Notes 
and Impressions," E. P. Button & Co., New York ; one 
poem from "The Giant and the Star," Small, Maynard 
& Co., Boston; Section VII and part of Section VIII 
of ''An Ode" written in commemoration of the found- 
ing of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and published 
by John P. Morton & Co., Louisville, Ky. ; some five 
or six poems from "New Poems," published in London 
by Mr. Grant Richards in 1909 ; and three or four selec- 
tions from the volume of selections entitled "Kentucky 
Poems," compiled by Mr. Edmund Gosse and published 
in London by Mr. Grant Richards in 1902. Acknowl- 
edgment and thanks for permission to reprint the 
various poems included in this volume are herewith 
made to the different publishers. 



vi INTRODUCTORY NOTE 

The two poems, "in Arcady" and "The Black 
Knight" are new and are published here for the first 
time. 

In making the selections for the present book Mr. 
Cawein has endeavored to cover the entire field of his 
poetical labors, which extends over a quarter of a cen- 
tury. With the exception of his dramatic work, as 
witnessed by one volume only, ''The Shadow Garden," 
a book of plays four in number, published in 1910, the 
selection herewith presented by us is, in our opinion, 
representative of the author's poetical work. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Poetry of Madison Cawein xiii 

tlyinn to Spiritual Desire ....... i 

Beautiful-Bosomed, O Night 4 

Discovery .......... 7 

O Maytime Woods 8 

The Redbird 10 

A Niello 12 

In May 16 

Aubade 18 

Apocalypse ' ... 20 

Penetralia 21 

Elusion 23 

Womanhood 26 

The Idyll of the Standing-Stone 27 

Noera ........... 29 

The Old Spring 32 

A Dreamer of Dreams 34 

Deep in the Forest 

I. Spring on the Hills 37 

II. Moss and Fern 38 

III. The Thorn Tree ....... 40 

IV. The Hamadryad 42 

Preludes 44 

May 46 

What Little Things 47 

vii 



viii CONTENTS 

PAGE 

In the Shadow of the Beeches 48 

Unrequited 50 

The Solitary 51 

A Twilight Moth 52 

The Old Farm 54 

The Whippoorwill 58 

Revealment 60 

Hepaticas 61 

The Wind of Spring 63 

The Catbird 64 

A Woodland Grave 66 

Sunset Dreams 68 

The Old Byway 70 

" Below the Sunset's Range of Rose " 72 

Music of Summer ......... 74 

Midsummer .......... 77 

The Rain-Crow 80 

Field and Forest Call 82 

Old Homes 84 

The Forest Way 86 

Sunset and Storm 88 

Quiet Lanes 89 

One who loved Nature 93 

Garden Gossip 97 

Assumption 99 

Senorita 100 

Overseas . . . . . . . . . . 102 

Problems 105 

To a Windflower 106 

Voyagers 108 

The Spell no 

Uncertainty 113 



CONTENTS ix 

PAGE 

In the Wood ii6 

Since Then Ii8 

Dusk in the Woods . . . • a • • .119 

Paths 121 

The Quest 123 

The Garden of Dreams 125 

The Path to Faery 127 

There are Faeries 130 

The Spirit of the Forest Spring 133 

In a Garden 135 

In the Lane 137 

The Window on the Hill 139 

The Picture 140 

Moly . . .141 

Poppy and Mandragora 144 

A Road Song 147 

Phantoms 148 

Intimations of the Beautiful 150 

October 165 

Friends 167 

Comradery 169 

Bare Boughs 171 

Days and Days 173 

Autumn Sorrow 174 

The Tree-Toad 175 

The Chipmunk 177 

The Wild Iris 1 79 

Drouth 181 

Rain 183 

At Sunset 184 

The Leaf-Cricket 185 

The Wind of Winter 188 



X CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Owlet 190 

Evening on the Farm 193 

The Locust 197 

The Dead Day 199 

The Old Water-Mill 200 

Argonauts 206 

"The Morn that breaks its Heart of Gold" .... 208 

A Voice on the Wind 212 

Requiem 215 

Lynchers 217 

The Parting 219 

Feud 221 

Ku Klux 223 

Eidolons 225 

The Man Hunt 227 

My Romance 229 

A Maid who died Old 231 

Ballad of Low-Lie-Down 233 

Romance 235 

Amadis and Oriana 238 

The Rosicrucian 240 

The Age of Gold 243 

Beauty and Art 244 

The Sea Spirit 246 

Gargaphie 248 

The Dead Oread 251 

The Faun 253 

The Paphian Venus 255 

Oriental Romance 259 

The Mameluke 261 

The Slave 263 

The Portrait . . 265 



CONTENTS xi 

PAGE 

The Black Knight 269 

In Arcady 278 

Prototypes 282 

March 283 

Dusk 284 

The Winds 285 

Light and Wind 286 

Enchantment * • 287 

Abandoned 2S8 

After Long Grief 289 

Mendicants 290 

The End of Summer 291 

November 292 

The Death of Love 294 

Unanswered 295 

The Swashbuckler 296 

Old Sir John 297 

Uncalled 298 



THE POETRY OF MADISON CAWEIN 

When a poet begins writing, and we begin liking his 
work, we own willingly enough that we have not, and 
cannot have, got the compass of his talent. We must 
wait till he has written more, and we have learned to 
like him more, and even then we should hesitate his 
definition, from all that he has done, if we did not very 
commonly qualify ourselves from the latest thing he has 
done. Between the earliest thing and the latest thing 
there may have been a hundred different things, and 
in his swan-long Hfe of a singer there would probably be 
a hundred yet, and all different. But we take the latest 
as if it summed him up in motive and range and tend- 
ency. Many parts of his work offer themselves in 
confirmiation of our judgmicnt, while those which might 
impeach it shrink away and hide themselves, and leave 
us to our precipitation, our catastrophe. 

It was surely nothing less than by a catastrophe that 
I should have been so betrayed in the volumes of 
Mr. Cawein's verse which reached me last before the 
volume of his collected poems. ... I had read his 
poetry and loved it from the beginning, and in each 

xiii 



xiv THE POETRY OF MADISON CAWEIN 

successive expression of it, I had delighted in its expand- 
ing and maturing beauty. I believe I had not failed 
to own its compass, and when — 

" He touched the tender stops of various quills," 

I had responded to every note of the changing music. I 
did not always respond audibly either in public or in 
private, for it seemed to me that so old a friend might 
fairly rest on the laurels he had helped bestow. But 
when that last volume came, I said to myself, "This 
applausive silence has gone on long enough. It is time 
to break it with open appreciation. Still," I said, "I 
must guard against too great appreciation ; I must mix 
in a little depreciation, to show that I have read atten- 
tively, critically, authoritatively." So I applied myself 
to the cheapest and easiest means of depreciation, and 
asked, "Why do you always write Nature poems? 
Why not Human Nature poems?" or the like. But in 
seizing upon an objection so obvious that I ought to 
have known it was superficial, I had wronged a poet, 
who had never done me harm, but only good, in the 
very terms and conditions of his being a poet. I had 
not stayed to see that his nature poetry was instinct 
with human poetry, with his human poetry, with mine, 
with yours. I had made his reproach what ought to 
have been his finest praise, what is always the praise of 



THE POETRY OF MADISON CAWEIN xv 

poetry when it is not artificial and formal. I ought to 
have said, as I had seen, that not one of his lovely land- 
scapes in which I could discover no human figure, but 
thrilled with a human presence penetrating to it from 
his most sensitive and subtle spirit until it was all but 
painfully alive with memories, with regrets, with long- 
ings, with hopes, with all that from time to time mutably 
constitutes us men and women, and yet keeps us chil- 
dren. He has the gift, in a measure that I do not think 
surpassed in any poet, of touching some smallest or 
commonest thing in nature, and making it live from the 
manifold associations in which we have our being, and 
glow thereafter with an inextinguishable beauty. His 
felicities do not seem sought ; rather they seem to seek 
him, and to surprise him with the delight they impart 
through him. He has the inspiration of the right 
word, and the courage of it, so that though in the first 
instant you may be challenged, you may be revolted, 
by something that you might have thought uncouth, 
you are presently overcome by the happy bravery of it, 
and gladly recognize that no other word of those verbal 
saints or aristocrats, dedicated to the worship or service 
of beauty, would at all so well have conveyed the sense 
of it as this or that plebeian. 

If I began indulging myself in the pleasure of quota- 
tion, or the delight of giving proofs of what I say, I 
should soon and far transcend the modest bounds which 



xvi THE POETRY OF MADISON CAWEIN 

the editor has set my paper. But the reader may take 
it from me that no other poet, not even of the great 
EHzabethan range, can outword this poet when it comes 
to choosing some epithet fresh from the earth or air, 
and with the morning sun or hght upon it, for an emotion 
or experience in which the race renews its youth from 
generation to generation. He is of the kind of Keats 
and Shelley and Wordsworth and Coleridge, in that 
truth to observance and experience of nature and the 
joyous expression of it, which are the dominant charac- 
teristics of his art. It is imaginable that the thinness of 
the social life in the Middle West threw the poet upon 
the communion with the fields and woods, the days and 
nights, the changing seasons, in which another great 
nature poet of ours declares they "speak in various 
language." But nothing could be farther from the 
didactic mood in which ''communion with the various 
forms" of nature casts the Puritanic soul of Bryant, 
than the mood in which this German-blooded, Ken- 
tucky-born poet, who keeps throughout his song the 
sense of a perpetual and inalienable youth, with a spirit 
as pagan as that which breathes from Greek sculpture — 
but happily not more pagan. Most modern poets who 
are antique are rather over-Hellenic, in their wish not 
to be English or French, but there is nothing voluntary 
in Mr. Cawein's naturalization in the older world of 
myth and fable ; he is too sincerely and solely a poet to 



THE POETRY OF MADISON CAWEIN xvii 

be a posseur ; he has his eyes everywhere except on the 
spectator, and his affair is to report the beauty that he 
sees, as if there were no one by to hear. 

An interesting and charming trait of his poetry is its 
constant theme of youth and its Umit within the range 
that the emotions and aspirations of youth take. He 
might indeed be called the poet of youth if he resented 
being called the poet of nature ; but the poet of youth, 
be it understood, of vague regrets, of "tears, idle tears," 
of "long, long thoughts," for that is the real youth, and 
not the youth of the supposed hilarity, the attributive 
recklessness, the daring hopes. Perhaps there is some 
such youth as this, but it has not its home in the breast 
of any young poet, and he rarely utters it ; at best he 
is of a Hght melancholy, a smiling wistfulness, and upon 
the whole, October is more to his mind than May. 

In Mr. Cawein's work, therefore, what is not the 
expression of the world we vainly and rashly call the 
inanimate world, is the hardly more dramatized, and 
not more enchantingly imagined story of lovers, rather 
unhappy lovers. He finds his own in this sort far and 
near ; in classic Greece, in heroic England, in romantic 
Germany, where the blue flower blows, but not less in 
beautiful and familiar Kentucky, where the blue grass 
shows itself equally the emblem of poetry, and the 
moldering log in the cabin wall or the woodland path 
is of the same poetic value as the marble of the ruined 



xviii THE POETRY OF MADISON CAWEIN 

temple or the stone of the crumbUng castle. His 
singularly creative fancy breathes a soul into every scene ; 
his touch leaves everything that was dull to the sense 
before glowing in the light of joyful recognition. He 
classifies his poems by different names, and they are of 
different themes, but they are after all of that unity 
which I have been trying, all too shirkingly, to suggest. 
One, for instance, is the pathetic story which tells 
itself in the lyrical eclogue ''One Day and Another." 
It is the conversation, prolonged from meeting to meet- 
ing, between two lovers whom death parts; but who 
recurrently find themselves and each other in the gar- 
dens and the woods, and on the waters which they tell 
each other of and together delight in. The effect is 
that which is truest to youth and love, for these trans- 
mutations of emotion form the disguise of self which 
makes passion tolerable; but mechanically the result 
is a series of nature poems. More genuinely dramatic 
are such pieces as ''The Feud," "Ku Klux," and "The 
Lynchers," three out of many; but one which I value 
more because it is worthy of Wordsworth, or of Tenny- 
son in a Wordsworthian mood, is "The Old Mill," 
where, with all the wonted charm of his landscape 
art, Mr. Cawein gives us a strongly local and novel piece 
of character painting. 

I deny myself with increasing reluctance the pleasure 
of quoting the stanzas, the verses, the phrases, the 



THE POETRY OF MADISON CAWEIN xix 

epithets, which lure me by scores and hundreds in his 
poems. It must suffice me to say that I do not know 
any poem of his which has not some such a f ehcity ; I 
do not know any poem of liis which is not worth reading, 
at least the first time, and often the second and the third 
time, and so on as often as you have the chance of re- 
curring to it. Some disappoint and others delight more 
than others; but there is none but in greater or less 
measure has the witchery native to the poet, and his 
place and his period. 

It is only in order of his later time that I would put 
Mr. Cawein first among those Midwestern poets, of 
whom he is the youngest. Poetry in the Middle West 
has had its development in which it was eclipsed by the 
splendor, transitory if not vain, of the California school. 
But it is deeply rooted in the life of the region, and is as 
true to its origins as any faithful portraiture of the 
Midwestern landscape could be ; you could not mistake 
the source of the poem or the picture. In a certain 
tenderness of light and coloring, the poems would recall 
the mellowed masterpieces of the older literatures rather 
than those of the New England school, where conscience 
dwells almost rebukingly with beauty. . . . 

W. D. Ho WELLS. 

From The North American Review. Copyright, 1908, by the 
North American Review Publishing Company. 



POEMS 

HYMN TO SPIRITUAL DESIRE 



Mother of visions, with lineaments dulcet as numbers 

Breathed on the eyelids of Love by music that 
slumbers, 

Secretly, sweetly, O presence of fire and snow, 

Thou comest mysterious, 

In beauty imperious, 

Clad on with dreams and the light of no world that we 
know: 

Deep to my innermost soul am I shaken, 

Helplessly shaken and tossed. 

And of thy tyrannous yearnings so utterly taken, 

My lips, unsatisfied, thirst ; 

Mine eyes are accurst 

With longings for visions that far in the night are for- 
saken ; 

And mine ears, in listening lost. 

Yearn, waiting the note of a chord that will never 
awaken. 



2 HYMN TO SPIRITUAL DESIRE 

II 

Like palpable music thou comest, like moonlight ; and 

far, — 
Resonant bar upon bar, — 
The vibrating lyre 

Of the spirit responds with melodious fire. 
As thy fluttering fingers now grasp it and ardently shake. 
With laughter and ache, 

The chords of existence, the instrument star-sprung, 
Whose frame is of clay, so wonderfully molded of mire. 

Ill 

Vested with vanquishment, come, O Desire, Desire ! 
Breathe in this harp of my soul the audible angel of 

Love ! 
Make of my heart an Israfel burning above, 
A lute for the music of God, that lips, which are mortal, 

but stammer ! 
Smite every rapturous wire 

With golden delirium, rebellion and silvery clamor. 
Crying — " Awake ! awake ! 
Too long hast thou slumbered! too far from the regions 

of glamour 
With its mountains of magic, its fountains of faery, the 

spar-sprung, 
Hast thou wandered away, O Heart ! 



HYMN TO SPIRITUAL DESIRE 3 

Come, oh, come and partake 

Of necromance banquets of Beauty ; and slake 

Thy thirst in the waters of Art, 

That are drawn from the streams 

Of love and of dreams. 

IV 

" Come, oh, come ! 

No longer shall language be dumb ! 

Thy vision shall grasp — 

As one doth the glittering hasp 

Of a sword made splendid with gems and with gold — 

The wonder and richness of Hfe, not anguish and hate of 

it merely. 
And out of the stark 
Eternity, awful and dark, 
Immensity silent and cold, — 

Universe-shaking as trumpets, or cymbaHng metals, 
Imperious ; yet pensive and pearly 
And soft as the rosy unfolding of petals, 
Or crumbling aroma of blossoms that wither too 

early, — 
The majestic music of God, where He plays 
On the organ, eternal and vast, of eons and days." 



BEAUTIFUL-BOSOMED, O NIGHT 



Beautiful-bosomed, O Night, in thy noon 

Move with majesty onward ! soaring, as Hghtly 

As a singer may soar the notes of an exquisite tune, 

The stars and the moon 

Through the clerestories high of the heaven, the firma- 
ment's halls : 

Under whose sapphirine walls, 

June, hesperian June, 

Robed in divinity wanders. Daily and nightly 

The turquoise touch of her robe, that the violets star, 

The silvery fall of her feet, that lilies are. 

Fill the land with languorous Hght and perfume. — ^ 

Is it the melody mute of burgeoning leaf and of bloom ? 

The music of Nature, that silently shapes in the gloom 

Immaterial hosts 

Of spirits that have the flowers and leaves in their 
keep. 

Whom I hear, whom I hear ? 

With their sighs of silver and pearl ? 

Invisible ghosts, — 

Each sigh a shadowy girl, — 

4 



BEAUTIFUL-BOSOMED, O NIGHT 5 

Who whisper in leaves and glimmer in blossoms and 

hover 
In color and fragrance and loveliness, breathed from the 

deep 
World-soul of the mother, 
Nature ; who over and over, — 
Both sweetheart and lover, — 
Goes singing her songs from one sweet month to the 

other. 

II 

Lo ! 'tis her songs that appear, appear, 
In forest and field, on hill-land and lea, 
As visible harmony, 
Materialized melody, 

Crystallized beauty, that out of the atmosphere 
Utters itself, in wonder and mystery, 
Peopling with glimmering essence the hyaline far and 
the near. . . . 

Ill 

Behold how it sprouts from the grass and blossoms from 

flower and tree ! 
In waves of diaphanous moonlight and mist. 
In fugue upon fugue of gold and of amethyst. 
Around me, above me it spirals; now slower, now 

faster, 



6 BEAUTIFUL-BOSOMED, O NIGHT 

Like symphonies born of the thought of a musical 

master. — 
O music of Earth ! O God, who the music inspired ! 
Let me breathe of the life of thy breath ! 
And so be fulfilled and attired 
In resurrection, triumphant o'er time and o'er death ! 



DISCOVERY 

What is it now that I shall seek 
Where woods dip downward, in the hills ? 
A mossy nook, a ferny creek, 
And May among the daffodils. 

Or in the valley's vistaed glow, 
Past rocks of terraced trumpet vines, 
Shall I behold her coming slow. 
Sweet May, among the columbines ? 

With redbud cheeks and bluet eyes, 
Big eyes, the homes of happiness. 
To meet me with the old surprise, 
Her wild-rose hair all bonnetless. 

Who waits for me, where, note for note, 
The birds make glad the forest trees ? — 
A dogwood blossom at her throat. 
My May among th' anemones. 

As sweetheart breezes kiss the blooms. 
And dews caress the moon's pale beams, 
My soul shall drink her lips' perfumes, 
And know the magic of her dreams. 
7 



O MAYTIME WOODS! 

From the idyll " Wild Thorn and Lily" 

Maytime woods ! O Maytime lanes and hours ! 
And stars, that knew how often there at night 
Beside the path, where woodbine odors blew 
Between the drowsy eyelids of the dusk, — 
When, like a great, white, pearly moth, the moon 
Hung silvering long windows of your room, — 

1 stood among the shrubs ! The dark house slept. 
I watched and waited for — I know not what ! — 
Some tremor of your gown : a velvet leaf's 
Unfolding to caresses of the Spring : 

The rustle of your footsteps : or the dew 
Syllabling avowal on a tulip's lips 
Of odorous scarlet : or the whispered word 
Of something lovelier than new leaf or rose — 
The word young lips half murmur in a dream : 

Serene with sleep, light visions weigh her eyes : 
And underneath her window blooms a quince. 

The night is a sultana who doth rise 
In slippered caution, to admit a prince, 

Love, who her eunuchs and her lord defies. 
8 



O MAYTIME WOODS ! 9 

Are these her dreams ? or is it that the breeze 
Pelts me with petals of the quince, and lifts 

The Balm-o'-Gilead buds ? and seems to squeeze 
Aroma on aroma through sweet rifts 

Of Eden, dripping through the rainy trees. 

Along the path the buckeye trees begin 
To heap their hills of blossoms. — Oh, that they 

Were Romeo ladders, whereby I might win 

Her chamber's sanctity ! — where dreams must pray 

About her soul ! — That I might enter in ! — 

A dream, — and see the balsam scent erase 
Its dim intrusion ; and the starry night 

Conclude majestic pomp ; the virgin grace 
Of every bud abashed before the white, 

Pure passion-flower of her sleeping face. 



THE REDBIRD 

From " Wild Thorn and Lily " 

Among the white haw-blossoms, where the creek 
Droned under drifts of dogwood and of haw, 
The redbird, like a crimson blossom blown 
Against the snow-white bosom of the Spring, 
The chaste confusion of her lawny breast. 
Sang on, prophetic of serener days, 
As confident as June's completer hours. 
And I stood Hstening like a hind, who hears 
A wood nymph breathing in a forest flute 
Among the beech-boles of myth-haunted ways : 
And when it ceased, the memory of the air 
Blew like a syrinx in my brain : I made 
A lyric of the notes that men might know : 

He flies with fhrt and fluting — 

As flies a crimson star 
From flaming star-beds shooting — 

From where the roses are. 

Wings past and sings ; and seven 
Notes, wild as fragrance is, — 



THE REDBIRD n 

That turn to flame in heaven, — 
Float round him full of bHss. 

He sings ; each burning feather 
Thrills, throbbing at his throat ; 

A song of firefly weather. 
And of a glowworm boat : 

Of Elfland and a princess 

Who, born of a perfume. 
His music rocks, — where winces 

That rosebud's cradled bloom. 

No bird sings half so airy. 

No bird of dusk or dawn, 
Thou masking King of Faery ! 

Thou red-crowned Oberon ! 



A NIELLO 



It is not early spring and yet 
Of bloodroot blooms along the stream, 
And blotted banks of violet, 
My heart will dream. 

Is it because the windflower apes 
The beauty that was once her brow, 
That the white memory of it shapes 
The April now ? 

Because the wild-rose wears the blush 
That once made sweet her maidenhood. 
Its thought makes June of barren bush 
And empty wood ? 

And then I think how young she died — 
Straight, barren Death stalks down the trees, 
The hard-eyed Hours by his side. 
That kill and freeze. 



A NIELLO 13 

II 

When orchards are in bloom again 

My heart will bound, my blood will beat, 

To hear the redbird so repeat, 

On boughs of rosy stain, 
His bhthe, loud song, — like some far strain 
From out the past, — among the bloom, — 
(Where bee and wasp and hornet boom) — 

Fresh, redolent of rain. 

When orchards are in bloom once more, 
Invasions of lost dreams will draw 
My feet, like some insistent law. 

Through blossoms to her door : 
In dreams I'll ask her, as before, 
To let me help her at the well ; 
And fill her pail ; and long to tell 

My love as once of yore. 

I shall not speak until we quit 
The farm-gate, leading to the lane 
And orchard, all in bloom again. 

Mid which the bluebirds sit 
And sing ; and through whose blossoms flit 
The catbirds cr3dng while they fly : 
Then tenderly I'll speak, and try 

To tell her all of it. 



14 A NIELLO 

And in my dream again she'll place 
Her hand in mine, as oft before, — 
When orchards are in bloom once more, — 

With all her young-girl grace : 
And we shall tarry till a trace 
Of sunset dyes the heav'ns ; and then — 
We'll part ; and, parting, I again 

Shall bend and kiss her face. 

And homeward, singing, I shall go 
Along the cricket-chirring ways. 
While sunset, one long crimson blaze 

Of orchards, Ungers low : 
And my dead youth again I'll know, 
And all her love, when spring is here — 
Whose memory holds me many a year, 

Whose love still haunts me so ! 

Ill 

I would not die when Springtime lifts 

The white world to her maiden mouth, 
And heaps its cradle with gay gifts. 

Breeze-blown from out the singing South : 
Too full of life and loves that cling ; 

Too heedless of all mortal woe, 
The young, unsympathetic Spring, 

That Death should never know. 



A NIELLO 15 

I would not die when Summer shakes 

Her daisied locks below her hips, 
And naked as a star that takes 

A cloud, into the silence slips : 
Too rich is Summer ; poor in needs ; 

In egotism of loveliness 
Her pomp goes by, and never heeds 

One Ufe the more or less. 

But I would die when Autumn goes, 

The dark rain dripping from her hair, 
Through forests where the wild wind blows 

Death and the red wreck everywhere : 
Sweet as love's last farewells and tears 

To fall asleep when skies are gray, 
In the old autumn of my years. 

Like a dead leaf borne far away. 



IN MAY 



When you and I in the hills went Maying, 
You and I in the bright May weather, 
The birds, that sang on the boughs together. 

There in the green of the woods, kept saying 
All that my heart was saying lovv^, 
"I love you ! love you !" soft and low, — 
And did you know? 

When you and I in the hills went Maying. 



II 

There where the brook on its rocks went winking. 
There by its banks where the May had led us. 
Flowers, that bloomed in the woods and meadows, 
Azure and gold at our feet, kept thinking 
All that my soul was thinking there, 
"I love you ! love you !" softly there — 
And did you care ? 
There where the brook on its rocks went winking. 
i6 



IN MAY 



III 



17 



Whatever befalls through fate's compelling, 
Should our paths unite or our pathways sever, 
In the Mays to come I shall feel forever 
The wildfiowers thinking, the wild birds telling, 
In words as soft as the falHng dew. 
The love that I keep here still for you, 
Both deep and true, 
Whatever befalls through fate's compelling. 



i> 



AUBADE 

Awake ! the dawn is on the hills ! 

Behold, at her cool throat a rose, 

Blue-eyed and beautiful she goes, 
Leaving her steps in daffodils. — 
Awake ! arise ! and let me see 

Thine eyes, whose deeps epitomize 
All dawns that were or are to be, 

O love, all Heaven in thine eyes ! — 
Awake ! arise ! come down to me ! 

Behold ! the dawn is up : behold ! 

How all the birds around her float, 

Wild rills of music, note on note, 
Spilling the air with mellow gold. — 
Arise ! awake ! and, drawing near, 

Let me but hear thee and rejoice ! 
Thou, who keep'st captive, sweet and clear. 

All song, O love, within thy voice ! 
Arise ! awake ! and let me hear ! 

See, where she comes, with limbs of day, 
The dawn ! with wild-rose hands and feet, 
Within whose veins the sunbeams beat. 

And laughters meet of wind and ray. 
i8 



AUBADE 19 

Arise ! come down ! and, heart to heart. 



Love, let me clasp in thee all these — 
The sunbeam, of which thou art part, 

And all the rapture of the breeze ! — 
Arise ! come down ! loved that thou art ! 



APOCALYPSE 

Before I found her I had found 
Within my heart, as in a brook, 

Reflections of her : now a sound 
Of imaged beauty ; now a look. 

So when I found her, gazing in 
Those Bibles of her eyes, above 

All earth, I read no word of sin ; 
Their holy chapters all were love. 

I read them through. I read and saw 
The soul impatient of the sod — 

Her soul, that through her eyes did draw 
Mine — to the higher love of God. 



PENETRALIA 

I AM a part of all you see 

In Nature ; part of all you feel : 

I am the impact of the bee 

Upon the blossom ; in the tree 

I am the sap, — that shall reveal 

The leaf, the bloom, — that flows and flutes 

Up from the darkness through its roots. 

I am the vermeil of the rose, 

The perfume breathing in its veins ; 

The gold within the mist that glows 

Along the west and overflows 

With light the heaven ; the dew that rains 

Its freshness dow^n and strings with spheres 

Of wet the webs and oaten ears. 

I am the egg that folds the bird ; 

The song that beaks and breaks its shell ; 

The laughter and the wandering word 

The w^ater says ; and, dimly heard, 

The music of the blossom's bell 

When soft winds swing it ; and the sound 

Of grass slow-creeping o'er the ground. 



22 PENETRALIA 

I am the warmth, the honey-scent 
That throats with spice each Hly-bud 
That opens, white with wonderment, 
Beneath the moon ; or, downward bent, 
Sleeps with a moth beneath its hood : 
I am the dream that haunts it too. 
That crystalHzes into dew. 

I am the seed within the pod ; 

The worm within its closed cocoon : 

The wings within the circling clod. 

The germ, that gropes through soil and sod 

To beauty, radiant in the noon : 

I am all these, behold ! and more — 

I am the love at the world-heart's core. 



ELUSION 



I 



My soul goes out to her who says, 
" Come, follow me and cast off care ! " 
Then tosses back her sun-bright hair, 
And hke a flower before me sways 
Between the green leaves and my gaze : 
This creature Hke a girl, who smiles 
Into my eyes and softly lays 
Her hand in mine and leads me miles, 
Long miles of haunted forest ways. 

II 

Sometimes she seems a faint perfume, 
A fragrance that a flower exhaled 
And God gave form to ; now, unveiled, 
A sunbeam making gold the gloom 
Of vines that roof some woodland room 
Of boughs ; and now the silvery sound 
Of streams her presence doth assume — 
Music, from which, in dreaming drowned, 
A crystal shape she seems to bloom. 
23 



24 ELUSION 



III 

Sometimes she seems the Hght that Hes 
On foam of waters where the fern 
Shimmers and drips ; now, at some turn 
Of woodland, bright against the skies, 
She seems the rainbowed mist that flies ; 
And now the mossy fire that breaks 
Beneath the feet in azure eyes 
Of flowers ; now the wind that shakes 
Pale petals from the bough that sighs. 

IV 

Sometimes she lures me with a song ; 

Sometimes she guides me with a laugh ; 

Her white hand is a magic staff, 

Her look a spell to lead me long : 

Though she be weak and I be strong, 

She needs but shake her happy hair, 

But glance her eyes, and, right or wrong, 

My soul must follow — anywhere 

She wills — far from the world's loud throng. 



Sometimes I think that she must be 
No part of earth, but merely this — 



ELUSION 25 

The fair, elusive thing we miss 

In Nature, that we dream we see 

Yet never see : that goldenly 

Beckons ; that, hmbed with rose and pearl, 

The Greek made a divinity : — 

A nymph, a god, a glimmering girl, 

That haunts the forest^s mystery. 



WOMANHOOD 

I 

The summer takes its hue 

From something opulent as fair in her, 

And the bright heaven is brighter than it was ; 

Brighter and loveher, 

Arching its beautiful blue, 

Serene and soft, as her swe^t gaze, o'er us. 

II 

The springtime takes its moods 

From something in her made of smiles and tears, 

And flowery earth is llowerier than before, 

And happier, it appears, 

Adding new multitudes 

To flowers, like thoughts, that haunt us evermore. 

Ill 

Summer and spring are wed 
In her — her nature ; and the glamour of 
Their loveHness, their bounty, as it were, 
Of life and joy and love, 
Her being seems to shed, — 
The magic aura of the heart of her. 
26 



THE IDYLL OF THE STANDING-STONE 

The teasel and the horsemint spread 
The hillside as with sunset, sown 
With blossoms, o'er the Standing-Stone 

That ripples in its rocky bed : 
There are no treasuries that hold 
Gold richer than the marigold 

That crowns its sparkling head. 

'Tis harvest time : a mower stands 
Among the morning wheat and whets 
His scythe, and for a space forgets 

The labor of the ripening lands ; 

Then bends, and through the dewy grain 
His long scythe hisses, and again 

He swings it in his hands. 

And she beholds him where he mows 

On acres whence the water sends 

Faint music of reflecting bends 
And falls that interblend with flows : 

She stands among the old bee-gums, — 

Where all the apiary hums, — 
A simple bramble-rose. 
27 



28 THE IDYLL OF THE STANDING-STONE 

She hears him whistling as he leans, 

And, reaping, sweeps the ripe wheat by ; 
She sighs and smiles, and knows not why, 

Nor what her heart's disturbance means : 
He whets his scythe, and, resting, sees 
Her rose-like 'mid the hives of bees, 

Beneath the flowering beans. 

The peacock-purple lizard creeps 
Along the rail ; and deep the drone 
Of insects makes the country lone 

With summer where the water sleeps : 
She hears him singing as he swings 
His scythe — who thinks of other things 

Than toil, and, singing, reaps. 



NOERA 

NoERA, when sad Fall 

Has grayed the fallow ; 
Leaf-cramped the wood-brook's brawl 

In pool and shallow ; 
When, by the woodside, tall 

Stands sere the mallow. 

Noera, when gray gold 

And golden gray 
The crackling hollows fold 

By every way, 
Shall I thy face behold, 

Dear bit of May ? 

When webs are cribs for dew, 

And gossamers 
Streak by you, silver-blue ; 

When silence stirs 
One leaf, of rusty hue, 

Among the burrs : 

Noera, through the wood. 
Or through the grain, 
29 



30 NOERA 

Come, with the hoiden mood 

Of wind and rain 
Fresh in thy sunny blood, 

Sweetheart, again. 

Noera, when the corn, 
Reaped on the fields. 

The asters' stars adorn ; 
And purple shields 

Of ironweeds lie torn 
Among the wealds : 

Noera, haply then, 
Thou being with me, 

Each ruined greenwood glen 
Will bud and be 

Spring's with the spring again, 
The spring in thee. 

Thou of the breezy tread ; 

Feet of the breeze : 
Thou of the sunbeam head ; 

Heart hke a bee's : 
Face like a woodland-bred 

Anemone's. 

Thou to October bring 
An April part ! 



NOERA 31 

Come ! make the wild birds sing, 

The blossoms start ! 
Noera, with the spring 

Wild in thy heart ! 

Come with our golden year : 

Come as its gold : 
With the same laughing, clear, 

Loved voice of old : 
In thy cool hair one dear 

Wild marigold. 



THE OLD SPRING 



Under rocks whereon the rose 

Like a streak of morning glows ; 

Where the azure-throated newt 

Drowses on the twisted root ; 

And the brown bees, humming homeward, 

Stop to suck the honeydew ; 

Fern- and leaf-hid, gleaming gloamvv^ard. 

Drips the wildwood spring I knew. 

Drips the spring my boyhood knew, 

II 

Myrrh and music everywhere 
Haunt its cascades — like the hair 
That a Naiad tosses cool, 
Swimming strangely beautiful. 
With white fragrance for her bosom, 
And her mouth a breath of song — 
Under leaf and branch and blossom 
Flows the woodland spring along, 
SparkUng, singing flows along. 
32 



THE OLD SPRING ^^ 

III 

Still the wet wan mornings touch 
Its gray rocks, perhaps ; and such 
Slender stars as dusk may have 
Pierce the rose that roofs its wave ; 
Still the thrush may call at noontide 
And the whippoorwill at night ; 
Nevermore, by sun or moontide, 
Shall I see it gliding white, 
Falling, flowing, wild and white. 



A DREAMER OF DREAMS 

He lived beyond men, and so stood 
Admitted to the brotherhood 
Of beauty : — dreams, with which he trod 
Companioned Hke some sylvan god. 
And oft men wondered, when his thought 
Made all their knowledge seem as naught, 
If he, like Uther's mystic son, 
Had not been born for Avalon. 

When wandering mid the whispering trees, 

His soul communed with every breeze ; 

Heard voices calling from the glades. 

Bloom- words of the Leimoniads ; 

Or Dryads of the ash and oak. 

Who syllabled his name and spoke 

With him of presences and powers 

That ghmpsed in sunbeams, gloomed in showers. 

By every violet-hallowed brook, 
Where every bramble-matted nook 
Rippled and laughed with water sounds, 
He walked like one on sainted grounds, 
34 



A DREAMER OF DREAMS 35 

Fearing intrusion on the spell 
That kept some fountain-spirit's well, 
Or woodland genius, sitting where 
Red, racy berries kissed his hair. 

Once when the wind, far o'er the hill. 

Had fall'n and left the wildwood still 

For Dawn's dim feet to trail across, — 

Beneath the gnarled boughs, on the moss, 

The air around him golden-ripe 

With daybreak, — there, with oaten pipe. 

His eyes beheld the wood-god. Pan, 

Goat-bearded, horned ; half brute, half man ; 

Who, shaggy-haunched, a savage rhyme 

Blew in his reed to rudest time ; 

And swoUen-jowled, with rolling eye — 

Beneath the slowly silvering sky. 

Whose rose streaked through the forest's roof — 

Danced, while beneath his boisterous hoof 

The branch was snapped, and, interfused 

Between gnarled roots, the moss was bruised. 

And often when he wandered through 
Old forests at the fall of dew — 
A new Endymion, who sought 
A beauty higher than all thought — 



36 A DREAMER OF DREAMS 

Some night, men said, most surely he 

Would favored be of deity : 

That in the holy solitude 

Her sudden presence, long-pursued, 

Unto his gaze would stand confessed : 

The awful moonlight of her breast 

Come, high with majesty, and hold 

His heart's blood till his heart grew cold, 

Unpulsed, unsinewed, all undone, 

And snatch his soul to Avalon. 



DEEP IN THE FOREST 

I 

Spring on the Hills 

Ah, shall I follow, on the hills, 
The Spring, as wild wings follow ? 

Where wild-plum trees make wan the hills, 
Crabapple trees the hollow. 
Haunts of the bee and swallow ? 

In redbud brakes and flowery 

Acclivities of berry ; 
In dogwood dingles, showery 

With white, where wrens make merry ? 

Or drifts of swarming cherry ? 

In vallej^s of wild strawberries. 
And of the clumped May-apple ; 

Or cloudlike trees of haw-berries. 
With which the south winds grapple, 
That brook and byway dapple ? 

With eyes of far forgetfulness, — 
Like some wild wood-thing's daughter, 
37 



38 DEEP IN THE FOREST 

Whose feet are beelike fretfulness, — 
To see her run like water 
Through boughs that slipped or caught her. 

O Spring, to seek, yet find you not ! 

To search, yet never win you ! 
To gHmpse, to touch, but bind you not ! 

To lose, and still continue, 

All sweet evasion in you ! 

In pearly, peach-blush distances 
You gleam ; the woods are braided 

Of myths ; of dream-existences . . . 
There, where the brook is shaded, 
A sudden splendor faded. 

O presence, like the primrose's, 

Again I feel your power ! 
With rainy scents of dim roses. 

Like some elusive flower, 

Who led me for an hour ! 

II 

Moss AND Fern 

Where rise the brakes of bramble there. 

Wrapped with the trailing rose ; 
Through cane where waters ramble, there 



DEEP IN THE FOREST 39 

Where deep the sword-grass grows, 
Who knows ? 
Perhaps, unseen of eyes of man, 
Hides Pan. 

Perhaps the creek, whose pebbles make 

A foothold for the mint. 
May bear, — where soft its trebles make 
Confession, — some vague hint, 
(The print, 
Goat-hoofed, of one who lightly ran,) 
Of Pan. 

Where, in the hollow of the hills 

Ferns deepen to the knees, 
What sounds are those above the hills. 
And now among the trees ? — 
No breeze ! — 
The syrinx, haply, none may scan. 
Of Pan. 

In woods where waters break upon 

The hush like some soft word ; 
Where sun-shot shadows shake upon 
The moss, who has not heard — 
No bird ! — 
The flute, as breezy as a fan. 
Of Pan? 



40 DEEP IN THE FOREST 

Far in, where mosses lay for us 
Still carpets, cool and plush ; 
Where bloom and branch and ray for us 
Sleep, v/aking with a rush — 
The hush 
But sounds the satyr hoof a span 
Of Pan. 

O woods, — whose thrushes sing to us, 
Whose brooks dance sparkling heels ; 
Whose wild aromas cling to us, — 
While here our wonder kneels. 
Who steals 
Upon us, brown as bark with tan, 
But Pan? . 



Ill 

The Thoen Tree 

The night is sad with silver and the day is glad with 
gold. 

And the woodland silence listens to a legend never old, 

Of the Lady of the Fountain, whom the faery people 
know. 

With her hmbs of samite whiteness and her hair of gol- 
den glow. 



DEEP IN THE FOREST 41 

Whom the boyish South Wind seeks for and the girHsh- 

stepping Rain ; 
Whom the sleepy leaves still whisper men shall never 

see again : 
She whose Vivien charms were mistress of the magic 

Merlin knew, 
That could change the dew to glowworms and the glow- 
worms into dew. 
There's a thorn tree in the forest, and the faeries know 

the tree. 
With its branches gnarled and wrinkled as a face with 

sorcery ; 
But the Maytime brings it clusters of a rainy fragrant 

white. 
Like the bloom-bright brows of beauty or a hand of 

Hfted light. 
And all day the silence whispers to the sun-ray of the 

morn 
How the bloom is lovely Vivien and how Merlin is the 

thorn : 
How she won the doting wizard with her naked loveH- 

ness 
Till he told her daemon secrets that must make his 

magic less. 

How she charmed him and enchanted in the thorn-tree's 
thorns to lie 



42 DEEP IN THE FOREST 

Forever with his passion that should never dim or die : 
And with wicked laughter looking on this thing which 

she had done, 
Like a visible aroma lingered sparkling in the sun : 
How she stooped to kiss the pathos of an elf-lock of his 

beard, 
In a mockery of parting and mock pity of his weird : 
But her magic had forgotten that "who bends to give a 

kiss 
Will but bring the curse upon them of the person whose 

it is": 
So the silence tells the secret. — And at night the faeries 

see 
How the tossing bloom is Vivien, who is struggling to be 

free. 
In the thorny arms of Merlin, who forever is the tree. 

IV 

The Hamadryad 

She stood among the longest ferns 

The valley held ; and in her hand 
One blossom, like the Hght that burns 

VermiHon o'er a sunset land ; 

And round her hair a twisted band 
Of pink-pierced mountain-laurel blooms : 

And darker than dark pools, that stand 



DEEP IN THE FOREST 43 

Below the star-communing glooms, 
Her eyes beneath her hair's perfumes. 

I saw the moonbeam sandals on 

Her flowerlike feet, that seemed too chaste 
To tread true gold : and, like the dawn 

On splendid peaks that lord a waste 

Of solitude lost gods have graced, 
Her face : she stood there, faultless-hipped, 

Bound as with cestused silver, — chased 
With acorn-cup and crown, and tipped 
With oak leaves, — whence her chiton slipped. 

Limbs that the gods call loveliness ! — 

The grace and glory of all Greece 
Wrought in one marble shape were less 

Than her perfection ! — 'Mid the trees 

I saw her — and time seemed to cease 
For me. — And, lo ! I lived my old 

Greek life again of classic ease. 
Barbarian as the myths that rolled 
Me back into the Age of Gold. 



PRELUDES 



There is no rhyme that is half so sweet 

As the song of the wind in the rippHng wheat ; 

There is no metre that's half so fine 

As the lilt of the brook under rock and vine ; 

And the loveliest lyric I ever heard 

Was the wildwood strain of a forest bird. — 

If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach 

My heart their beautiful parts of speech, 

And the natural art that they say these with, 

My soul would sing of beauty and myth 

In a rhyme and metre that none before 

Have sung in their love, or dreamed in their lore. 

And the world would be richer one poet the more. 

II 

A thought to lift me up to those 
Sweet wildflowers of the pensive woods ; 
The lofty, lowly attitudes 
Of bluet and of bramble-rose : 
To lift me where my mind may reach 
The lessons which their beauties teach. 
44 



PRELUDES 45 

A dream, to lead my spirit on 

With sounds of faery shawms and flutes, 

And all mysterious attributes 

Of skies of dusk and skies of dawn : 

To lead me, like the wandering brooks, 

Past all the knowledge of the books. 

A song, to make my heart a guest 
Of happiness whose soul is love ; 
One with the Hfe that knoweth of 
But song that turneth toil to rest : 
To make me cousin to the birds. 
Whose music needs not wisdom's words. 



MAY 

The golden discs of the rattlesnake-weed, 
That spangle the woods and dance — 

No gleam of gold that the twilights hold 
Is strong as their necromance : 

For, under the oaks where the woodpaths lead, 

The golden discs of the rattlesnake-weed 
Are the May's own utterance. 

The azure stars of the bluet bloom, 
That sprinkle the woodland's trance — 

No blink of blue that a cloud lets through 
Is sweet as their countenance : 

For, over the knolls that the woods perfume, 

The azure stars of the bluet bloom 
Are the light of the May's own glance. 

With her wondering words and her looks she comes. 

In a sunbeam of a gown ; 
She needs but think and the blossoms wink. 

But look, and they shower down. 
By orchard ways, where the wild bee hums. 
With her wondering words and her looks she comes 

Like a little maid to town. 
46 



WHAT LITTLE THINGS! 

From " One Day and Another " 

What little things are those 
That hold our happiness! 

A smile, a glance, a rose 

Dropped from her hair or dress ; 

A word, a look, a touch, — 
These are so much, so much. 

An air we can't forget ; 

A sunset's gold that gleams ; 
A spray of mignonette, 

Will fill the soul with dreams 
More than all history says, 

Or romance of old days. 

For of the human heart, 

Not brain, is memory ; 
These things it makes a part 

Of its own entity ; 
The joys, the pains whereof 

Are the very food of love. 
47 



IN THE SHADOW OF THE BEECHES 

In the shadow of the beeches, 

Where the fragile wildflowers bloom ; 

Where the pensive silence pleaches 
Green a roof of cool perfume, 

Have you felt an awe imperious 

As when, in a church, mysterious 
Windows paint with God the gloom ? 

In the shadow of the beeches, 

Where the rock-ledged waters flow ; 

Where the sun's slant splendor bleaches 
Every wave to foaming snow, 

Have you felt a music solemn 

As when minster arch and column 
Echo organ worship low ? 

In the shadow of the beeches, 

Where the light and shade are blent ; 

Where the forest bird beseeches. 

And the breeze is brimmed with scent, — 

Is it joy or melancholy 

That o'erwhelms us partly, wholly, 
To our spirit's betterment ? 



IN THE SHADOW OF THE BEECHES 49 

In the shadow of the beeches 

Lay me where no eye perceives ; 
Where, — Hke some great arm that reaches 

Gently as a love that grieves, — 
One gnarled root may clasp me kindly, 
While the long years, working blindly, 

Slowly change my dust to leaves. 



UNREQUITED 

Passion ? not hers ! who held me with pure eyes : 
One hand among the deep curls of her brow, 

I drank the girlhood of her gaze with sighs : 
She never sighed, nor gave me kiss or vow. 

So have I seen a clear October pool. 
Cold, liquid topaz, set within the sere 

Gold of the woodland, tremorless and cool, 
Reflecting all the heartbreak of the year. 

Sweetheart? not she! whose voice was music-sweet ; 

Whose face loaned language to melodious prayer. 
Sweetheart I called her. — When did she repeat 

Sweet to one hope, or heart to one despair ! 

So have I seen a wildflower's fragrant head 
Sung to and sung to by a longing bird ; 

And at the last, albeit the bird lay dead. 
No blossom wilted, for it had not heard. 



so 



THE SOLITARY 

Upon the mossed rock by the spring 
She sits, forgetful of her pail, 

Lost in remote remembering 

Of that which may no more avail. 

Her thin, pale hair is dimly dressed 
Above a brow lined deep with care, 

The color of a leaf long pressed, 
A faded leaf that once was fair. 

You may not know her from the stone 
So still she sits who does not stir, 

Thinking of this one thing alone — 
The love that never came to her. 



SI 



A TWILIGHT MOTH 

Dusk is thy davm ; when Eve puts on its state 
Of gold and purple in the marbled west, 

Thou comest forth like some embodied trait, 
Or dim conceit, a lily bud confessed ; 

Or of a rose the visible wish ; that, white. 

Goes softly me^sengering through the night, 
Whom each expectant flower makes its guest. .?> 

All day the primroses have thought of thee. 

Their golden heads close-haremed from the heat ; 

All day the mystic moonflowers silkenly 

Veiled snowy faces, — that no bee might greet. 

Or butterfly that, weighed with pollen, passed ; — 

Keeping Sultana charms for thee, at last, 
Their lord, who comest to salute each sweet. 

Cool-throated flowers that avoid the day's 
Too fervid kisses ; every bud that drinks 

The tipsy dew and to the starlight plays 

Nocturnes of fragrance, thy wing'd shadow links 

In bonds of secret brotherhood and faith ; 

O bearer of their order's shibboleth. 

Like some pale symbol fluttering o'er these pinks. 
52 



A TWILIGHT MOTH 53 

What dost thou whisper in the balsam's ear 
That sets it blushing, or the hollyhock's, — 

A syllabled silence that no man may hear, — 
As dreamily upon its stem it rocks ? 

What spell dost bear from listening plant to plant, 

Like some white witch, some ghostly ministrant, 
Some specter of som.e perished flower of phlox ? 

O voyager of that universe which lies 

Between the four wails of this garden fair, — 

Whose constellations are the fireflies 
That wheel their instant courses everywhere, — 

Mid faery firmaments wherein one sees 

Mimic Bootes and the Pleiades, 

Thou steerest like some faery ship of air. 

Gnome-wrought of moonbeam-fluff and gossamer, 
Silent as scent, perhaps thou chariotest 

Mab or King Oberon ; or, haply, her 

His queen, Titania, on some midnight quest. — 

Oh for the herb, the magic euphrasy. 

That should unmask thee to mine eyes, ah me ! 
And all that world at which my soul hath guessed ! 



THE OLD FARM 

DoRMERED and verandaed, cool, 
Locust-girdled, on the hill ; 

Stained with weather-wear, and dull- 
Streak'd with lichens ; every sill 

Thresholding the beautiful ; 

I can see it standing there, 

Brown above the woodland deep, 

Wrapped in lights of lavender, 
By the warm wind rocked asleep, 

Violet shadows ever3rwhere. 

I remember how the Spring, 
Liberal-lapped, bewildered its 

Acred orchards, murmuring. 
Kissed to blossom ; budded bits 

Where the wood-thrush came to sing. 

Barefoot Spring, at first who trod, 
Like a beggermaid, adown 

The wet woodland ; where the god. 
With the bright sun for a crown 

And the firmament for rod, 
54 



THE OLD FAPvM 55 

Met her ; clothed her ; wedded her ; 

Her Cophetua : when, lo ! 
All the hill, one breathing blur. 

Burst in beauty ; gleam and glow 
Blent with pearl and lavender. 

Seckel, blackheart, palpitant 

Rained their bleaching strays ; and white 
Snowed the damson, bent aslant ; 

Rambow-tree and romanite 
Seemed beneath deep drifts to pant. 

And it stood there, brown and gray, 

In the bee-boom and the bloom, 
In the shadow and the ray. 

In the passion and perfume, 
Grave as age among the gay. 

Wild with laughter romped the clear 

Boyish voices round its walls ; 
Rare wild-roses were the dear 

Girlish faces in its halls, 
Music-haunted all the year. 

Far before it meadows full 
Of green pennyroyal sank ; 



56 THE OLD FARM 

Clover-dotted as with wool 

Here and there ; with now a bank 
Hot of color ; and the cool 

Dark-blue shadows unconfined 
Of the clouds rolled overhead : 

Clouds, from which the summer wind 
Blew with rain, and freshly shed 

Dew upon the flowerkind. 

Where through mint and gypsy-lily 
Runs the rocky brook away, 

Musical among the hilly 

Solitudes, — its flashing spray 

Sunlight-dashed or forest-stilly, — 

Buried in deep sassafras, 
Memory follows up the hill 

Still some cowbell's mellow brass. 
Where the ruined water-mill 

Looms, half-hid in cane and grass. . . 

Oh, the farmhouse ! is it set 
On the hilltop still ? 'mid musk 

Of the meads ? where, violet. 
Deepens all the dreaming dusk, 

And the locust-trees hang wet. 



THE OLD FARM 57 

While the sunset, far and low, 
On its westward windows dashes 

Primrose or pomegranate glow ; 
And above, in glimmering splashes, 

Lilac stars the heavens sow. 

Sleeps it still among its roses, — 

Oldtime roses ? while the choir 
Of the lonesome insects dozes : 

And the white moon, drifting higher, 
O'er its mossy roof reposes — 
Sleeps it still among its roses ? 



THE WHIPPOORWILL 



Above lone woodland ways that led 
To dells the stealthy twilights tread 
The west was hot geranium red ; 

And still, and still, 
Along old lanes the locusts sow 
With clustered pearls the Maytimes know, 
Deep in the crimson afterglow. 
We heard the homeward cattle low, 
And then the far-off, far-off woe 

Of " whippoorwill !" of ''whippoorwill !" 



II 



Beneath the idle beechen boughs 
We heard the far bells of the cows 
Come slowly jangling towards the house ; 

And still, and still. 
Beyond the light that would not die 
Out of the scarlet-haunted sky ; 
S8 



THE WHIPPOORWILL 59 

Beyond the evening-star's white eye 
Of glittering chalcedony, 
Drained out of dusk the plaintive cry 
Of "whippoorwill," of ''whippoorwill." 

Ill 

And in the city oft, when swims 

The pale moon o'er the smoke that dims 

Its disc, I dream of wildwood Hmbs ; 

And still, and still, 
I seem to hear, where shadows grope 
Mid ferns and flowers that dewdrops rope, — 
Lost in faint deeps of heliotrope 
Above the clover-sweetened slope, — 
Retreat, despairing, past all hope. 

The whippoorwill, the whippoorwill. 



REVEALMENT 

A SENSE of sadness in the golden air ; 

A pensiveness, that has no part in care, 
As if the Season, by some woodland pool. 

Braiding the early blossoms in her hair, 

Seeing her loveliness reflected there, 
Had sighed to find herself so beautiful. 

A breathlessness ; a feeUng as of fear ; 

Holy and dim, as of a mystery near. 
As if the World, about us, whispering went 

With lifted finger and hand-hollowed ear, 

Hearkening a music, that we cannot hear. 
Haunting the quickening earth and firmament. 

A prescience of the soul that has no name ; 

Expectancy that is both wild and tame. 
As if the Earth, from out its azure ring 

Of heavens, looked to see, as white as flame, — 

As Perseus once to chained Andromeda came, - 
The swift, divine revealment of the Spring. 



60 



HEPATICAS 

In the frail hepaticas, — 

That the early Springtide tossed, 

Sapphire-like, along the ways 

Of the woodlands that she crossed, — 

I behold, with other eyes, 

Footprints of a dream that flies. 

One who leads me ; whom I seek : 

In v/hose loveliness there is 
All the glamour that the Greek 

Knew as wind-borne Artemis. — 
I am mortal. Woe is me ! 

Her sweet immortality ! 

Spirit, must I always fare, 
Following thy averted looks ? 

Now thy white arm, now thy hair, 

Glim.psed among the trees and brooks ? 

Thou who hauntest, whispering. 
All the slopes and vales of Spring. 
6i 



62 HEPATICAS 

Cease to lure ! or grant to me 
All thy beauty ! though it pain, 

Slay with splendor utterly ! 
Flash revealment on my brain ! 

And one moment let me see 
All thy immortality ! 



THE WIND OF SPRING 

The wind that breathes of columbines 
And celandines that crowd the rocks ; 
That shakes the balsam of the pines 
With laughter from his airy locks, 
Stops at my city door and knocks. 

He calls me far a-forest, where 

The twin-leaf and the blood-root bloom ; 

And, circled by the amber air. 

Life sits with beauty and perfume 

Weaving the new web of her loom. 

He calls me where the waters run 

Through fronding ferns where wades the hern ; 

And, sparkling in the equal sun, 

Song leans above her brimming urn. 

And dreams the dreams that love shall learn. 

The wind has summoned, and I go : 
To read God's meaning in each line 
The wildflowers write ; and, walking slow, 
God's purpose, of which song is sign, — 
The wind's great, gusty hand in mine. 
63 



THE CATBIRD 



The tufted gold of the sassafras, 

And the gold of the spicewood-bush, 
Bewilder the ways of the forest pass, 

And brighten the underbrush : 
The white-starred drifts of the wild-plum tree, 

And the haw with its pearly plumes, 
And the redbud, misted rosily. 

Dazzle the woodland glooms. 



II 

And I hear the song of the catbird wake 

I' the boughs o' the gnarled wild-crab. 
Or there where the snows of the dogwood shake. 

That the silvery sunbeams stab : 
And it seems to me that a miagic lies 

In the crystal sweet of its notes. 
That a myriad blossoms open their eyes 

As its strain above them floats. 
64 



THE CATBIRD 65 

III 

I see the bluebell's blue unclose, 

And the trilhum's stainless white ; 
The birdfoot-violet's purple and rose, 

And the poppy, golden-bright ! 
And I see the eyes of the bluet wink, 

And the heads of the white-hearts nod ; 
And the baby mouths of the woodland-pink 

And sorrel salute the sod. 

IV 

And this, meseems, does the catbird say, 

As the blossoms crowd i' the sun : — 
" Up, up ! and out ! oh, out and away ! 

Up, up ! and out, each one ! 
Sweethearts ! sweethearts ! oh, sweet, sweet, sweet ! 

Come Hsten and hark to me ! 
The Spring, the Spring, with her fragrant feet, 
Is passing this way ! — Oh, hark to the beat 
Of her beelike heart ! — Oh, sweet, sweet, sweet ! 

Come ! open your eyes and see ! 
See, see, see !" 



A WOODLAND GRAVE 

White moons may come, white moons may go 
She sleeps where early blossoms blow ; 
Knows nothing of the leafy June, 
That leans above her night and noon, 
Crowned now with sunbeam, now with moon, 
Watching her roses grow. 

The downy moth at twilight comes 
And flutters round their honeyed blooms : 
Long, lazy clouds, like ivory, 
That isle the blue lagoons of sky, 
Redden to molten gold and dye 
With flame the pine-deep glooms. 

Dew, dripping from wet fern and leaf ; 
The wind, that shakes the violet's sheaf ; 
The slender sound of water lone. 
That makes a harp-string of some stone, 
And now a wood bird's glimmering moan, 
Seem whisperings there of grief. 

Her garden, where the lilacs grew, 
Where, on old walls, old roses blew, 
66 



A WOODLAND GRAVE 67 

Head-heavy with their mellow musk, 
Where, when the beetle's drone was husk, 
She lingered in the dying dusk, 
No more shall know that knew. 

Her orchard, — where the Spring and she 
Stood listening to each bird and bee, — 
That, from its fragrant firmament. 
Snowed blossoms on her as she went, 
(A blossom with their blossoms blent) 
No more her face shall see. 

White moons may come, white moons may go — 
She sleeps where early blossoms blow : 
Around her headstone many a seed 
Shall sow itself ; and brier and weed 
Shall grow to hide it from men's heed, 
And none will care or know. 



SUNSET DREAMS 

The moth and beetle wing about 
The garden ways of other days ; 

Above the hills, a fiery shout 

Of gold, the day dies slowly out. 

Like some wild blast a huntsman blows 
And o'er the hills my Fancy goes. 

Following the sunset's golden call 

Unto a vine-hung garden wall, 

Where she awaits me in the gloom, 
Between the lily and the rose. 

With arms and lips of warm perfume, 
The dream of Love my Fancy knows. 

The glowworm and the firefly glow 
Among the ways of bygone days ; 

A golden shaft shot from a bow 

Of silver, star and moon swing low 
Above the hills where twilight lies : 
And o'er the hills my Longing flies. 

Following the star's far-arrowed gold. 

Unto a gate where, as of old, 
68 



SUNSET DREAMS 69 

She waits amid the rose and rue, 
With star-bright hair and night-dark eyes, 

The dream, to whom my heart is true. 
My dream of Love that never dies. 



THE OLD BYWAY 

Its rotting fence one scarcely sees 
Through sumac and wild blackberries, 

Thick elder and the bramble-rose, 
Big ox-eyed daisies where the bees 

Hang droning in repose. 

The Httle lizards lie all day 
Gray on its rocks of Uchen-gray ; 

And, insect-Ariels of the sun. 
The butterflies make bright its way, 

Its path where chipmunks run. 

A lyric there the redbird lifts. 
While, twittering, the swallow drifts 

'Neath wandering clouds of sleepy cream, - 
In which the wind makes azure rifts, — 

O'er dells where wood-doves dream. 

The brown grasshoppers rasp and bound 
Mid weeds and briers that hedge it round ; 

And in its grass-grown ruts, — where stirs 
The harmless snake, — mole-crickets sound 

Their faery dulcimers. 
70 



THE OLD BYWAY 71 

At evening, when the sad west turns 
To lonely night a cheek that burns, 

The tree-toads in the wild-plum sing ; 
And ghosts of long-dead flowers and ferns 

The winds wake, whispering. 



"BELOW THE SUNSET'S RANGE OF ROSE" 

Below the sunset's range of rose, 
Below the heaven's deepening blue, 
Down woodways where the balsam blows. 
And milkweed tufts hang, gray with dew, 
A Jersey heifer stops and lows — 
The cows come home by one, by two. 

There is no star yet : but the smell 

Of hay and pennyroyal mix 

With herb aromas of the dell. 

Where the root-hidden cricket cHcks : 

Among the ironweeds a bell 

Clangs near the rail-fenced clover-ricks. 

She waits upon the slope beside 
The windlassed well the plum trees shade, 
The well curb that the goose-plums hide ; 
Her hght hand on the bucket laid, 
Unbonneted she waits, glad-eyed. 
Her gown as simple as her braid. 
72 



"BELOW THE SUNSET'S RANGE OF ROSE" 73 

She sees fawn-colored backs among 
The sumacs now ; a tossing horn 
Its clashing bell of copper rung : 
Long shadows lean upon the corn, 
And slow the day dies, scarlet stung, 
The cloud in it a rosy thorn. 

Below the pleasant moon, that tips 
The tree tops of the hillside, fly 
The flitting bats ; the twilight sHps, 
In firefly spangles, twinkling by, 
Through which he comes : Their happy lips 
Meet — and one star leaps in the sky. 

He takes her bucket, and they speak 
Of married hopes while in the grass 
The plum drops glowing as her cheek ; 
The patient cows look back or pass : 
And in the west one golden streak 
Burns as if God gazed through a glass. 



MUSIC OF SUMMER 



Thou sit'st among the sunny silences 

Of terraced hills and woodland galleries, 

Thou utterance of all calm melodies, 

Thou lutanist of Earth's most afHuent lute, — 

Where no false note intrudes 
To mar the silent music, — branch and root, — 
Charming the fields ripe, orchards and deep woods, 

To song similitudes 

Of flower and seed and fruit. 

II 

Oft have I seen thee, in some sensuous air. 
Bewitch the broad wheat-acres everywhere 
To imitated gold of thy deep hair : 
The peach, by thy red lips' delicious trouble, 

Blown into gradual dyes 
Of crimson ; and beheld thy magic double — 
Dark-blue with fervid influence of thine eyes — 

The grapes' rotundities. 

Bubble by purple bubble. 
74 



MUSIC OF SUMMER 75 

III 

Deliberate uttered into life intense, 
Out of thy soul's melodious eloquence 
Beauty evolves its just preeminence : 
The lily, from some pensive-smitten chord 

Drawing significance 
Of purity, a visible hush stands : starred 
With splendor, from thy passionate utterance, 

The rose writes its romance 

In blushing word on word. 

IV 

As star by star Day harps in Evening, 

The inspiration of all things that sing 

Is in thy hands and from their touch takes wing : 

All brooks, all birds, — whom song can never sate, — 

The leaves, the wind and rain, 
Green frogs and insects, singing soon and late, 
Thy sympathies inspire, thy heart's refrain, 

Whose sounds invigorate 

With rest life's weary brain. 



And as the Night, like some mysterious rune, 
Its beauty makes emphatic with the moon, 
Thou lutest us no immaterial tune : 



76 MUSIC OF SUMMER 

But where dim whispers haunt the cane and corn, 

By thy still strain made strong, 
Earth's awful avatar, — in whom is born 
Thy own deep music, — labors all night long 

With growth, assuring Morn 

Assumes with onward song. 



MIDSUMMER 

I 

The mellow smell of hollyhocks 
And marigolds and pinks and phlox 
Blends with the homely garden scents 
Of onions, silvering into rods ; 
Of peppers, scarlet with their pods ; 
And (rose of all the esculents) 
Of broad plebeian cabbages, 
Breathing content and corpulent ease. 

II 

The buzz of wasp and fly makes hot 
The spaces of the garden-plot ; 
And from the orchard, — where the fruit 
Ripens and rounds, or, loosed with heat, 
Rolls, hornet-clung, before the feet, — 
One hears the veery's golden flute, 
That mixes with the sleepy hum 
Of bees that drowsily go and come. 

HI 

The podded musk of gourd and vine 
Embower a gate of roughest pine, 
77 



78 MIDSUMMER 

That leads into a wood where day 
Sits, leaning o'er a forest pool, 
Watching the liHes opening cool, 
And dragonflies at airy play, 
While, dim and near, the quietness 
Rustles and stirs her leafy dress. 

IV 

Far-off a cowbell clangs awake 
The noon who slumbers in the brake : 
And now a pewee, plaintively, 
Whistles the day to sleep again : 
A rain-crow croaks a rune for rain, 
And from the ripest apple tree 
A great gold apple thuds, where, slow, 
The red cock curves his neck to crow. 

V 

Hens cluck their broods from place to place, 
While clinking home, with chain and trace, 
The cart-horse plods along the road 
Where afternoon sits with his dreams : 
Hot fragrance of hay-making streams 
Above him, and a high-heaped load 
Goes creaking by and with it, sweet, 
The aromatic soul of heat. 



MIDSUMMER 79 

VI 

"Coo-ee ! coo-ee !" the evenfall 
Cries, and the hills repeat the call : 
"Coo-ee ! coo-ee !" and by the log 
t Labor unharnesses his plow, 



While to the barn comes cow on cow : 
" Coo-ee ! coo-ee ! " — and, with his dog. 
Barefooted boyhood down the lane 
"Coo-ees" the cattle home again. 



THE RAIN-CROW 



Can freckled August, — drowsing warm and blond 
Beside a wheat-shock in the white-topped mead, 

In her hot hair the yellow daisies wound, — 
O bird of rain, lend aught but sleepy heed 
To thee ? when no plumed weed, no feathered seed 

Blows by her ; and no ripple breaks the pond. 
That gleams like flint within its rim of grasses, 
Through which the dragonfly forever passes 
Like sphntered diamond. 

II 

Drouth weights the trees ; and from the farmhouse eaves 

The locust, pulse-beat of the summer day. 
Throbs ; and the lane, that shambles under leaves 
Limp with the heat — a league of rutty way — 
Is lost in dust ; and sultry scents of hay 
Breathe from the panting meadows heaped with 
sheaves — 
Now, now, O bird, what hint is there of rain, 
In thirsty meadow or on burning plain, 
That thy keen eye perceives ? 
80 



THE RAIN-CROW 8i 

III 

But thou art right. Thou prophesiest true. 
For hardly hast thou ceased thy forecasting, 

When, up the western fierceness of scorched blue, 
Great water-carrier winds their buckets bring 
Brimming with freshness. How their dippers ring 

And flash and rumble ! lavishing large dew 
On corn and forest land, that, streaming wet, 
Their hilly backs against the downpour set, 
Like giants, loom in view. 

IV 

The butterfly, safe under leaf and flower. 

Has found a roof, knowing how true thou art ; 

The bumblebee, within the last half-hour. 
Has ceased to hug the honey to its heart ; 
While in the barnyard, under shed and cart. 

Brood-hens have housed. — But I, who scorned thy 
power. 
Barometer of birds, — like August there, — 
Beneath a beech, dripping from foot to hair, 
Like some drenched truant, cower. 



FIELD AND FOREST CALL 



There is a field, that leans upon two hills, 

Foamed o'er of flowers and twinkhng with clear rills ; 

That in its girdle of wild acres bears 

The anodyne of rest that cures all cares ; 

Wherein soft wind and sun and sound are blent 

With fragrance — as in some old instrument 

Sweet chords ; — calm things, that Nature's magic spell 

Distills from Heaven's azure crucible, 

And pours on Earth to make the sick mind well. 

There lies the path, they say — 

Come away ! come away ! 

II 

There is a forest, lying 'twixt two streams, 
Sung through of birds and haunted of dim dreams ; 
That in its league-long hand of trunk and leaf 
Lifts a green wand that charms away all grief ; 
Wrought of quaint silence and the stealth of things, 
Vague, whispering touches, gleams and twitterings, 
Dews and cool shadows — that the mystic soul 

82 



FIELD AND FOREST CALL S^ 

Of Nature permeates with suave control, 

And waves o'er Earth to make the sad heart whole. 

There lies the road, the}^ say — 

Come away ! come away ! 






OLD HOMES 

Old homes among the hills ! I love their gardens ; 

Their old rock fences, that our day inherits ; 

Their doors, round which the great trees stand like 

wardens ; 
Their paths, down which the shadows march like spirits ; 
Broad doors and paths that reach bird-haunted gardens. 

I see them gray among their ancient acres, 
Severe of front, their gables lichen-sprinkled, — 
Like gentle-hearted, solitary Quakers, 
Grave and religious, with kind faces wrinkled, — 
Serene among their memory -hallowed acres. 

Their gardens, banked with roses and with lilies — 
Those sweet aristocrats of all the flowers — 
Where Springtime mints her gold in daffodillies, 
And Autumn coins her marigolds in showers. 
And all the hours are toilless as the lilies. 

I love their orchards where the gay woodpecker 
Flits, flashing o'er you, like a winged jewel ; 
Their woods, whose floors of moss the squirrels checker 
With half -hulled nuts ; and where, in cool renewal. 
The wild brooks laugh, and raps the red woodpecker. 

84 



OLD HOMES 85 

Old homes ! old hearts ! Upon my soul forever 
Their peace and gladness he hke tears and laughter ; 
Like love they touch me, through the years that sever, 
With simple faith ; like friendship, draw me after 
The dreamy patience that is theirs forever. 



I 



THE FOREST WAY 



I CLIMBED a forest path and found 
A dim cave in the dripping ground, 
Where dwelt the spirit of cool sound, 
Who wrought with crystal triangles, 
And hollowed foam of rippled bells, 
A music of mysterious spells. 

II 

Where Sleep her bubble-jewels spilled 
Of dreams ; and Silence twilight-filled 
Her emerald buckets, star-instilled. 
With liquid whispers of lost springs, 
And mossy tread of woodland things, 
And drip of dew that greenly clings. 

Ill 

Here by those servitors of Sound, 
Warders of that enchanted ground, 
My soul and sense were seized and bound. 
And, in a dungeon deep of trees 
Entranced, were laid at lazy ease. 
The charge of woodland mysteries. 
86 



THE FOREST WAY 87 

IV 

The minions of Prince Drowsihead, 
The wood-perfumes, with sleepy tread, 
Tiptoed around my ferny bed : 
And far away I heard report 
Of one who dimly rode to Court, 
The Faery Princess, Eve-Amort. 

V 

Her herald winds sang as they passed ; 
And there her beauty stood at last. 
With wild gold locks, a band held fast, 
Above blue eyes, as clear as spar ; 
While from a curved and azure jar 
She poured the white moon and a star. 



SUNSET AND STORM 

Deep with divine tautology, 
The sunset's mighty mystery 
Again has traced the scroll-hke west 
With hieroglyphs of burning gold : 
Forever new, forever old, 
Its miracle is manifest. 

Time lays the scroll away. And now 
Above the hills a giant brow 
Of cloud Night hf ts ; and from liis arm, 
Barbaric black, upon the world. 
With thunder, wind and fire, is hurled 
His awful argument of storm. 

What part, O man, is yours in such ? 
Whose awe and wonder are in touch 
With Nature, — speaking rapture to 
Your soul, — yet leaving in your reach 
No human word of thought or speech 
Commensurate with the thing you view. 



88 



QUIET LANES 

From the lyrical eclogue " One Day and Another " 

Now rests the season in forgetfulness, 
Careless in beauty of maturity ; 
The ripened roses round brown temples, she 
Fulfills completion in a dreamy guess. 
Now Time grants night the more and day the less : 
The gray decides ; and brown 
Dim golds and drabs in dulling green express 
Themselves and redden as the year goes down. 
Sadder the fields where, thrusting hoary high 
Their tasseled heads, the Lear-like corn-stocks die, 
And, Falstaff-like, buff-beUied pumpkins lie. — 
Deepening with tenderness, 
Sadder the blue of hills that lounge along 
The lonesome west ; sadder the song 
Of the wild redbird in the leafage yellow. — 
Deeper and dreamier, aye! 
Than woods or waters, leans the languid sky 
Above lone orchards where the cider press 
Drips and the russets mellow. 
89 



90 QUIET LANES 

Nature grows liberal : from the beechen leaves 

The beech-nuts' burrs their little purses thrust, 

Plump with the copper of the nuts that rust ; 

Above the grass the spendthrift spider weaves 

A web of silver for which dawn designs 

Thrice twenty rows of pearls : beneath the oak, 

That rolls old roots in many gnarly lines, — 

The poHshed acorns, from their saucers broke. 

Strew oval agates. — On sonorous pines 

The far wind organs ; but the forest near 

Is silent ; and the blue- white smoke 

Of burning brush, beyond that field of hay. 

Hangs like a pillar in the atmosphere : 

But now it shakes — it breaks, and all the 

vines 
And tree tops tremble ; see ! the wind is here ! 
Billowing and boisterous ; and the smiling day 
Rejoices in its clamor. Earth and sky 
Resound with glory of its majesty. 
Impetuous splendor of its rushing by. — 
But on those heights the woodland dark is still, 
Expectant of its coming. . . . Far away 
Each anxious tree upon each waiting hill 
Tingles anticipation, as in gray 
Surmise of rapture. Now the first gusts play. 
Like laughter low, about their rippling spines ; 
And now the wildwood, one exultant sway, 



QUIET LANES 91 

Shouts — and the light at each tumultuous pause, 
The light that glooms and shines, 
Seems hands in wild applause. 

How glows that garden ! — Though the white mists 

keep 
The vagabonding flowers reminded of 
Decay that comes to slay in open love, 
When the full moon hangs cold and night is deep ; 
Unheeding still their cardinal colors leap 
Gay in the crescent of the blade of death, — 
Spaced innocents whom he prepares to reap, — 
Staying his scythe a breath 
To mark their beauty ere, with one last sweep. 
He lays them dead and turns away to weep. — 
Let me admire, — 
Before the sickle of the coming cold 
Shall mow them down, — their beauties manifold : 
How like to spurts of fire 
That scarlet salvia lifts its blooms, which heap 
With flame the sunlight. And, as sparkles creep 
Through charring vellum, up that window's screen 
The cypress dots with crimson all its green. 
The haunt of many bees. 
Cascading dark old porch-built lattices. 
The nightshade bleeds with berries ; drops of blood 
Hanging in clusters 'mid the blue monk's-hood. 



92 QUIET LANES 

There is a garden old, 

Where bright-hued clumps of zinnias unfold 

Their formal flowers ; where the marigold 

Lifts a pinched shred of orange sunset caught 

And elfed in petals ; the nasturtium, 

Deep, pungent-leaved and acrid of perfume, 

Hangs up a goblin bonnet, pixy-brought 

From Gnomeland. There, predominant red, 

And arrogant, the dahlia lifts its head. 

Beside the balsam's rose-stained horns of honey, 

Lost in the murmuring, sunny 

Dry wildness of the weedy flower bed ; 

Where crickets and the weed-bugs, noon and night, 

Shrill dirges for the flowers that soon shall die. 

And flowers already dead. — 

I seem to hear the passing Summer sigh : 

A voice, that seems to weep, — 

"Too soon, too soon the Beautiful passes by ! 

And soon, among these bowers 

Will dripping Autumn mourn with all her flowers." 

If I, perchance, might peep 

Beneath those leaves of podded hollyhocks, 

That the bland wind with odorous murmurs rocks, 

I might behold her, — white 

And weary, — Summer, 'mid her flowers asleep. 

Her drowsy flowers asleep. 

The withered poppies knotted in her locks. 



ONE WHO LOVED NATURE 



He was not learned in any art ; 
But Nature led him by the hand ; 
And spoke her language to his heart 
So he could hear and understand : 
He loved her simply as a child ; 
And in his love forgot the heat 
Of conflict, and sat reconciled 
In patience of defeat. 

II 

Before me now I see him rise — 

A face, that seventy years had snowed 

With winter, where the kind blue eyes 

Like hospitable fires glowed : 

A small gray man whose heart was large, 

And big with knowledge learned of need ; 

A heart, the hard world made its targe, 

That never ceased to bleed. 

Ill 

He knew all Nature. Yea, he knew 
What virtue lay within each flower, 
93 



94 ONE WHO LOVED NATURE 

What tonic in the dawn and dew, 
And in each root what magic power : 
What in the wild witch-hazel tree 
Reversed its time of blossoming, 
And clothed its branches goldenly 
In fall instead of spring. 

IV 

He knew what made the firefly glow 
And pulse with crystal gold and flame ; 
And whence the bloodroot got its snow, 
And how the bramble's perfume came : 
He understood the water's word 
And grasshopper's and cricket's chirr ; 
And of the music of each bird 
He was interpreter. 



He kept no calendar of days, 

But knew the seasons by the flowers ; 

And he could tell you by the rays 

Of sun or stars the very hours. 

He probed the inner mysteries 

Of light, and knew the chemic change 

That colors flowers, and what is 

Their fragrance wild and strange. 



ONE WHO LOVED NATURE 



95 



VI 

If some old oak had power of speech, 
It could not speak more wildwood lore, 
Nor in experience further reach, 
Than he who was a tree at core. 
Nature was all his heritage. 
And seemed to fill his every need ; 
Her features were his book, whose page 
He never tired to read. 

VII 

He read her secrets that no man 
Has ever read and never will. 
And put to scorn the charlatan 
Who botanizes of her still. 
He kept his knowledge sweet and clean. 
And questioned not of why and what ; 
And never drew a Hne between 
What's known and what is not. 



VIII 

He was most gentle, good, and wise ; 
A simpler heart earth never saw : 
His soul looked softly from his eyes. 
And in his speech were love and awe. 



96 ONE WHO LOVED NATURE 

Yet Nature in the end denied 

The thing he had not asked for — fame ! 

Unknown, in poverty he died, 

And men forget his name. 



GARDEN GOSSIP 

Thin, chisel-fme a cricket chipped 

The crystal silence into sound ; 
And where the branches dreamed and dripped 
A grasshopper its dagger stripped 

And on the humming darkness ground. 

A bat, against the gibbous moon, 

Danced, implike, with its lone dehght ; 

The glowworm scrawled a golden rune 

Upon the dark ; and, emerald-strewn. 
The firefly hung with lamps the night. 

The flowers said their beads in prayer, 

Dew-syllables of sighed perfume ; 
Or talked of two, soft-standing there. 
One Uke a gladiole, straight and fair, 

And one like some rich poppy-bloom. 

The mignonette and feverfew 

Laid their pale brows together : — ^'See !" 
One whispered : "Did their step thrill through 
Your roots ?" — "Like rain." — "I touched the two 

And a new bud was born in me." 
H 97 



98 GARDEN GOSSIP 

One rose said to another : — " Whose 

Is this dim music ? song, that parts 
My crimson petals Hke the dews ? " 
"My blossom trembles with sweet news — 
It is the love of two young hearts." 



I 



ASSUMPTION 



A MILE of moonlight and the whispering wood : 
A mile of shadow and the odorous lane : 

One large, white star above the solitude, 

Like one sweet wish : and, laughter after pain, 
Wild-roses wistful in a web of rain. 

II 

No star, no rose, to lesson him and lead ; 

No woodsman compass of the skies and rocks, — 

Tattooed of stars and lichens, — doth love need 
To guide him where, among the hollyhocks, 
A blur of moonlight, gleam his sweetheart's locks. 

Ill 

We name it beauty — that permitted part, 

The love-elected apotheosis 
Of Nature, which the god within the heart. 

Just touching, makes immortal, but by this — 

A star, a rose, the memory of a kiss. 

99 



SENORITA 

An agate-black, your roguish eyes 
Claim no proud lineage of the skies, 
No starry blue ; but of good earth 
The reckless witchery and mirth. 

Looped in your raven hair's repose, 
A hot aroma, one red rose 
Dies ; envious of that loveliness, 
By being near which its is less. 

Twin sea shells, hung with pearls, your ears, 
Whose slender rosiness appears 
Part of the pearls ; whose pallid fire 
Binds the attention these inspire. 

One slim hand crumples up the lace 
About your bosom's swelHng grace ; 
A ruby at your samite throat 
Lends the required color note. 

The moon bears through the violet night 
A pearly urn of chaliced light ; 
And from your dark-railed balcony 
You stoop and wave your fan at me. 



SENORITA loi 

O'er orange orchards and the rose 
Vague, odorous Ups the south wind blows, 
Peophng the night with whispers of 
Romance and palely passionate love. 

The heaven of your balcony 

Smiles down tvv^o stars, that say to me 

More peril than Angehca 

Wrought with her beauty in Cathay. 

Oh, stoop to me ! and, speaking, reach 
My soul like song that learned sweet speech 
From some dim instrument — who knows ? — 
Or flower, a dulcimer or rose. 



OVERSEAS 

Non numero horas nisi serenas 

When Fall drowns morns in mist, it seems 

In soul I am a part of it ; 
A portion of its humid beams, 

A form of fog, I seem to flit 
From dreams to dreams. . . . 

An old chateau sleeps 'mid the hills 

Of France : an avenue of sorbs 
Conceals it : drifts of daffodils 

Bloom by a 'scutcheoned gate with barbs 
Like iron bills. 

I pass the gate unquestioned ; yet, 

I feel, announced. Broad holm-oaks make 

Dark pools of restless violet. 

Between high bramble banks a lake, — 
As in a net 

The tangled scales twist silver, — shines. . . , 

Gray, mossy turrets swell above 
A sea of leaves. And where the pines 

Shade ivied walls, there Ues my love, 
My heart divines. 



OVERSEAS 103 

I know her window, slimly seen 

From distant lanes with hawthorn hedged : 
Her garden, with the nectarine 

EspaHered, and the peach tree, wedged 
'Twixt walls of green. 

Cool-babbling a fountain falls 

From gryphons' mouths in porphyry ; 

Carp haunt its waters ; and white balls 
Of lilies dip it when the bee 
Creeps in and drawls. 

And butterflies — each with a face 

Of faery on its wings — that seem 
Beheaded pansies, softly chase 

Each other down the gloom and gleam 
Trees interspace. 

And roses ! roses, soft as vair, 

Round sylvan statues and the old 
Stone dial — Pompadours, that wear 

Their royalty of purple and gold 
With wanton air. . . . 

Her scarf, her lute, whose ribbons breathe 
The perfume of her touch ; her gloves, 

Modeling the daintiness they sheathe ; 
Her fan, a Watteau, gay with loves, 
Lie there beneath 



I04 OVERSEAS 

A bank of eglantine, that heaps 

A rose-strewn shadow. — Naive-eyed, 

With Kps as suave as they, she sleeps ; 
The romance by her, open wide, 
O'er which she weeps. 



PROBLEMS 

Man's are the learnings of his books — 
What is all knowledge that he knows 

Beside the wit of winding brooks, 
The wisdom of the summer rose ! 

How soil distills the scent in flowers 
Baffles his science : heaven-dyed, 

How, from the palette of His hours, 
God gives them colors, hath defied. 

What dream of heaven begets the light ? 

Or, ere the stars beat burning tunes, 
Stains all the hollow edge of night 

With glory as of molten moons ? 

Who is it answers what is birth 

Or death, that nothing may retard ? 

Or what is love, that seems of Earth, 
Yet wears God's own divine regard ? 



loS 



TO A WINDFLOWER 



Teach me the secret of thy loveliness, 
That, being made wise, I may aspire to be 

As beautiful in thought, and so express 
Immortal truths to Earth's mortality ; 

Though to my soul ability be less 
Than 'tis to thee, O sweet anemone. 

II 

Teach me the secret of thy innocence, 

That in simplicity I may grow wise ; 
Asking of Art no other recompense 

Than the approval of her own just eyes ; 
So may I rise to some fair eminence. 

Though less than thine, O cousin of the skies. 

Ill 

Teach me these things ; through whose high knowl- 
edge, I, — 
When Death hath poured oblivion through my veins, 
io6 



TO A WINDFLOWER 107 

And brought me home, as all are brought, to lie 
In that vast house, common to serfs and thanes, — 

I shall not die, I shall not utterly die, 
For beauty born of beauty — that remains. 



VOYAGERS 

Where are they, that song and tale 
Tell of ? lands our childhood knew ? 

Sea-locked Faerylands that trail 
Morning summits, dim with dew, 

Crimson o'er a crimson sail. 

Where in dreams we entered on 
Wonders eyes have never seen : 

Whither often we have gone, 
Sailing a dream-brigantine 

On from voyaging dawn to dawn. 

Leons seeking lands of song ; 

Fabled fountains pouring spray ; 
Where our anchors dropped among 

Corals of some tropic bay. 
With its swarthy native throng. 

Shoulder ax and arquebus ! — 
We may find it ! — past yon range 

Of sierras, vaporous. 

Rich with gold and wild and strange 

That lost region dear to us. 
io8 



VOYAGERS 109 

Yet, behold, although our zeal 

Darien summits may subdue, 
Our Balboa eyes reveal 

But a vaster sea come to — 
New endeavor for our keel. 

Yet ! who sails with face set hard 
Westward, — while behind him lies 

Unfaith, — where his dreams keep guard 
Round it, in the sunset skies, 

He may reach it — afterward. 



THE SPELL 

We have the receipt of fern seed: we walk invisible.''^ 

— Henry IV 

And we have met but twice or thrice ! — 

Three times enough to make me love ! — 
I praised your hair once ; then your glove ; 

Your eyes ; your gown ; — you were like ice ; 
And yet this might suffice, my love, 
And yet this might suffice. 

St. John hath told me what to do : 

To search and find the ferns that grow 
The fern seed that the faeries know ; 

Then sprinkle fern seed in my shoe. 

And haunt the steps of you, my dear, 
And haunt the steps of you. 

You'll see the poppy pods dip here ; 

The blow-ball of the thistle slip. 

And no wind breathing — but my lip 
Next to your anxious cheek and ear, 

To tell you I am near, my love, 

To tell you I am near, 
no 



THE SPELL III 

On wood-ways I shall tread your gown — 
You'll know it is no brier ! — then 
I'll whisper words of love again, 

And smile to see your quick face frown : 
And then I'll kiss it down, my dear, 
And then I'll kiss it down. 

And when at home you read or knit, — 

Who'll know it was my hands that blotted 
The page ? — or all your needles knotted ? 

When in your rage you cry a bit : 
And loud I laugh at it, my love. 
And loud I laugh at it. 

The secrets that you say in prayer 

Right so I'll hear : and, when you sing, 
The name you speak ; and whispering 

I'll bend and kiss your mouth and hair. 
And tell you I am there, my dear. 
And tell you I am there. 

Would it were true what people say ! — 

Would I could find that elfin seed ! 

Then should I win your love, indeed. 
By being near you night and day — 

There is no other way, my love, 

There is no other way. 



112 THE SPELL 

Meantime the truth in this is said : 

It is my soul that follows you ; 

It needs no fern seed in the shoe, — 
While in the heart love pulses red, 

To win you and to wed, my dear, 

To win you and to wed. 



UNCERTAINTY 
^^^He Cometh not,^ she said^ — Mariana 

It will not be to-day and yet 

I think and dream it will ; and let 

The slow uncertainty devise 

So many sweet excuses, met 

With the old doubt in hope's disguise. 

The panes were sweated with the dawn ; 
Yet through their dimness, shriveled drawn, 
The aigret of one princess-feather, 
One monk's-hood tuft with oilets wan, 
I glimpsed, dead in the slaying weather. 

This morning, when my window's chintz 
I drew, how gray the day was ! — Since 
I saw him, yea, all days are gray ! — 
I gazed out on my dripping quince, 
Defruited, gnarled ; then turned away 

To weep, but did not weep : but felt 
A colder anguish than did melt 
I "3 



114 UNCERTAINTY 

About the tearful-visaged year ! — 
Then flung the lattice wide, and smelt 
The autumn sorrow : Rotting near 

The rain-drenched sunflowers bent and bleached, 
Up which the frost-nipped gourd-vines reached 
And morning-glories, seeded o'er 
With ashen aiglets ; whence beseeched 
One last bloom, frozen to the core. 

The podded hollyhocks, — that Fall 
Had stripped of finery, — by the wall 
Rustled their tatters ; dripped and dripped, 
The fog thick on them : near them, all 
The tarnished, haglike zinnias tipped. 

I felt the death and loved it : yea. 
To have it nearer, sought the gray, 
Chill, fading garth. Yet could not weep. 
But wandered in an aimless way. 
And sighed with weariness for sleep. 

Mine were the fog, the frosty stalks ; 
The weak lights on the leafy walks ; 
The shadows shivering with the cold ; 
The breaking heart ; the lonely talks ; 
The last, dim, ruined marigold. 



UNCERTAINTY 115 

But when to-night the moon swings low — 

A great marsh-marigold of glow — 

And all my garden with the sea 

Moans, then, through moon and mist, I know 

My love will come to comfort me., 



IN THE WOOD 

The waterfall, deep in the wood, 

Talked drowsily with solitude, 

A soft, insistent sound of foam, 

That filled with sleep the forest's dome. 

Where, like some dream of dusk, she stood 

Accentuating soHtude. 

The crickets' tinkling chips of sound 

Strewed dim the twilight-twinkhng ground ; 

A whippoorwill began to cry. 

And glimmering through the sober sky 

A bat went on its drunken round. 

Its shadow following on the ground. 

Then from a bush, an elder-copse. 
That spiced the dark with musky tops, 
What seemed, at first, a shadow came 
And took her hand and spoke her name, 
And kissed her where, in starry drops, 
The dew orbed on the elder-tops. 

The glaucous glow of fireflies 
FHckered the dusk ; and foxlike eyes 
ii6 



IN THE WOOD 117 

Peered from the shadows ; and the hush 
Murmured a word of wind and rush 
Of fluttering waters, fragrant sighs, 
And dreams unseen of mortal eyes. 

The beetle flung its burr of sound 

Against the hush and clung there, wound 

In night's deep mane : then, in a tree, 

A grig began deliberately 

To file the stillness : all around 

A wire of shrillness seemed unwound. 

I looked for those two lovers there ; 
His ardent eyes, her passionate hair. 
The moon looked down, slow-climbing wan 
Heaven's slope of azure : they were gone : 
But where they'd passed I heard the air 
Sigh, faint with sweetness of her hair. 



SINCE THEN 

I FOUND myself among the trees 
What time the reapers ceased to reap ; 
And in the sunflower-blooms the bees 
Huddled brown heads and went to sleep, 
Rocked by the balsam-breathing breeze. 

I saw the red fox leave his lair, 
A shaggy shadow, on the knoll ; 
And tunneling his thoroughfare 
Beneath the soil, I watched the mole — 
Stealth's own self could not take more care. 

I heard the death-moth tick and stir, 
Slow-honeycombing through the bark ; 
I heard the cricket's drowsy chirr, 
And one lone beetle burr the dark — 
The sleeping woodland seemed to purr. 

And then the moon rose : and one white 
Low bough of blossoms — grown almost 
Where, ere you died, 'twas our delight 
To meet, — dear heart ! — I thought your ghost 
The wood is haunted since that night. 
ii8 



DUSK IN THE WOODS 

Three miles of trees it is : and I 
Came through the woods that waited, dumb, 
For the cool summer dusk to come ; 
And lingered there to watch the sky- 
Up which the gradual splendor clomb. 

A tree-toad quavered in a tree ; 
And then a sudden whippoorwill 
Called overhead, so wildly shrill 
The sleeping wood, it seemed to me, 
Cried out and then again was still. 

Then through dark boughs its stealthy flight 
An owl took ; and, at drowsy strife. 
The cricket tuned its faery fife ; 
And like a ghost-flower, silent white, 
The wood-moth glimmered into life. 

And in the dead wood ever3^where 
The insects ticked, or bored below 
The rotted bark ; and, glow on glow. 
The lambent fireflies here and there 
Lit up their jack-o'-lantern show. 
119 



120 DUSK IN THE WOODS 

I heard a vesper-sparrow sing^ 
Withdrawn, it seemed, into the far 
Slow sunset's tranquil cinnabar ; 
The crimson, softly smoldering 
Behind the trees, with its one star. 

A dog barked : and down ways that gleamed, 
Through dew and clover, faint the noise 
Of cowbells moved. And then a voice, 
That sang a-milking, so it seemed. 
Made glad my heart as some glad boy's. 

And then the lane : and, full in view, 
A farmhouse with its rose-grown gate, 
And honeysuckle paths, await 
For night, the moon, and love and you — 
These are the things that made me late. 



PATHS 



I 



What words of mine can tell the spell 
Of garden ways I know so well ? — 
The path that takes me in the spring 
Past quince-trees where the bluebirds sing, 
And peonies are blossoming, 
Unto a porch, wistaria-hung, 
Around whose steps May-lilies blow, 
A fair girl reaches down among. 
Her arm more white than their sweet snow. 

II 

What words of mine can tell the spell 
Of garden ways I know so well ? — 
Another path that leads me, when 
The summer time is here again, 
Past hollyhocks that shame the west 
When the red sun has sunk to rest ; 
To roses bowering a nest, 
A lattice, 'neath which mignonette 
And deep geraniums surge and sough. 
Where, in the twilight, starless yet, 
A fair girl's eyes are stars enough. 



122 PATHS 



III 



What words of mine can tell the spell 
Of garden ways I know so well ? — 
A path that takes me, when the days 
Of autumn wrap the hills in haze, 
Beneath the pippin-pelting tree, 
'Mid flitting butterfly and bee ; 
Unto a door where, fiery. 
The creeper climbs ; and, garnet-hued, 
The cock's-comb and the dahha flare, 
And in the door, where shades intrude. 
Gleams bright a fair girl's sunbeam hair. 

IV 

What words of mine can tell the spell 

Of garden ways I know so well ? — 

A path that brings me through the frost 

Of winter, when the moon is tossed 

In clouds ; beneath great cedars, weak 

With shaggy snow ; past shrubs blown bleak 

With shivering leaves ; to eaves that leak 

The tattered ice, whereunder is 

A fire-flickering window-space ; 

And in the light, with lips to kiss, 

A fair girl's welcome-smiling face. 



THE QUEST 



First I asked the honeybee, 

Busy in the balmy bowers ; 
Saying, "Sweetheart, tell it me: 
Have you seen her, honeybee ? 

She is cousin to the flowers — 
All the sweetness of the south 
In her wild-rose face and mouth." 
But the bee passed silently. 



II 

Then I asked the forest bird. 

Warbling by the woodland waters ; 

Saying, *' Dearest, have you heard? 

Have you heard her, forest bird ? 
She is one of music's daughters — 

Never song so sweet by half 

As the music of her laugh." 
But the bird said not a word. 
123 



124 THE QUEST 

III 

Next I asked the evening sky, 
Hanging out its lamps of fire ; 

Saying, ''Loved one, passed she by? 

Tell me, tell me, evening sky ! 
She, the star of my desire — 

Sister whom the Pleiads lost, 

And my soul's high pentecost." 
But the sky made no reply. 

IV 

Where is she ? ah, where is she ? 

She to whom both love and duty 
Bind me, yea, immortally. — 
Where is she ? ah, where is she ? 

Symbol of the Earth-Soul's beauty. 
I have lost her. Help my heart 
Find her ! her, who is a part 

Of the pagan soul of me. 



THE GARDEN OF DREAMS 

Not while I live may I forget 
That garden which my spirit trod ! 
Where dreams were flowers, wild and wet, 
And beautiful as God. 

Not while I breathe, awake, adream, 
Shall live again for me those hours, 
When, in its mystery and gleam, 
I met her 'mid the flowers. 

Eyes, talismanic heliotrope, 
Beneath mesmeric lashes, where 
The sorceries of love and hope 
Had made a shining lair. 

And daydawn brows, whereover hung 
The twflight of dark locks : wild birds, 
Her lips, that spoke the rose's tongue 
Of fragrance- voweled words. 

I will not tell of cheeks and chin. 
That held me as sweet language holds ; 
Nor of the eloquence within 
Her breasts' twin-mooned molds. 

125 



126 THE GARDEN OF DREAMS 

Nor of her body's languorous 

Wind-grace, that glanced like starlight through 

Her clinging robe's diaphanous 

Web of the mist and dew. 

There is no star so pure and high 
• As was her look ; no fragrance such 
As her soft presence ; and no sigh 
Of music like her touch. 

Not while I live may I forget 
That garden of dim dreams, where I 
And Beauty born of Music met. 
Whose spirit passed me by. 



THE PATH TO FAERY 

I 

When dusk falls cool as a rained-on rose, 

And a tawny tower the twilight shows, 

With the crescent moon, the silver moon, the curved 

new moon in a space that glows, 
A turret window that grows alight ; 
There is a path that my Fancy knows, 
A glimmering, shimmering path of night, 
That far as the Land of Faery goes. 

II 

And I follow the path, as Fancy leads, 

Over the mountains, into the meads, 

Where the firefly cities, the glowworm cities, the faery 

cities are strung like beads. 
Each city a twinkling star : 
And I live a hfe of valorous deeds. 
And march with the Faery King to war. 
And ride with his knights on milk-white steeds. 

in 

Or it's there in the whirl of their life I sit, 
Or dance in their houses with starlight lit, 

127 



128 THE PATH TO FAERY 

Their blossom houses, their flower houses, their elfin 

houses, of fern leaves knit, 
With fronded spires and domes : 
And there it is that my lost dreams flit, 
And the ghost of my childhood, smiling, roams 
With the faery children so dear to it. 

IV 

And it's there I hear that they all come true, 

The faery stories, whatever they do — 

Elf and goblin, dear elf and goblin, loved elf and goblin, 

and all the crew 
Of witch and wizard and gnome and fay. 
And prince and princess, that wander through 
The storybooks we have put away. 
The faerytales that we loved and knew. 



The face of Adventure lures you there, 

And the eyes of Danger bid you dare. 

While ever the bugles, the silver bugles, the far-off 

bugles of Elfland blare. 
The faery trumpets co battle blow ; 
And you feel their thrill in your heart and hair, 
And you fain would follow and mount and go 
And march with the Faeries anywhere. 



THE PATH TO FAERY 129 

VI 

And she — she rides at your side again, 
Your Httle sweetheart whose age is ten : 
She is the princess, the faery princess, the princess fair 

that you worshiped when 
You were a prince in a faerytale ; 
And you do great deeds as you did them then, 
With your magic spear, and enchanted mail, 
Braving the dragon in his den. 

VII 

And you ask again, — "Oh, where shall we ride, 

Now that the monster is slain, my bride ? " — 

''Back to the cities, the firefly cities, the glowworm 

cities where we can hide. 
The beautiful cities of Faeryland. 
And the light of my eyes shall be your guide. 
The light of my eyes and my snow-white hand — 
And there forever we two will abide." 



THERE ARE FAERIES 



There are faeries, bright of eye, 

Wlio the wildflowers' warders are 
Ouphes, that chase the firefly ; 

Elves, that ride the shooting-star ; 
Fays, who in a cobweb he, 

Swinging on a moonbeam bar ; 
Or who harness bumblebees, 
Grumbling on the clover leas. 
To a blossom or a breeze — 

That's their faery car. 
If you care, you too may see 
There are faeries. — Verily, 

There are faeries. 



II 

There are faeries. I could swear 
I have seen them busy, where 
Roses loose their scented hair, 

In the moonlight weaving, weaving, 
130 



THERE ARE FAERIES 

Out of starlight and the dew, 
GHnting gown and shunmering shoe ; 
Or, within a glowworm lair. 

From the dark earth slowly heaving 
Mushrooms whiter than the moon, 
On whose tops they sit and croon, 
With their grig-like mandolins. 
To fair faery ladykins, 
Leaning from the windowsill 
Of a rose or daffodil, 
Listening to their serenade 
All of cricket-music made. 
Follow me, oh, follow me ! 
Ho ! away to Faerie ! 
Where your eyes like mine may see 
There are faeries. — Verily, 

There are faeries. 

Ill 

There are faeries. Elves that swing 
In a wild and rainbow ring 
Through the air ; or mount the wing 
Of a bat to courier news 
To the faery King and Queen : 
Fays, who stretch the gossamers 
On which twilight hangs the dews ; 



LSI 



132 THERE ARE FAERIES 

Wlio, within the moonlight sheen, 
Whisper dimly in the ears 
Of the flowers words so sweet 
That their hearts are turned to musk 
And to honey ; things that beat 
In their veins of gold and blue : 
Ouphes, that shepherd moths of dusk 
Soft of wing and gray of hue — 
Forth to pasture on the dew. 

IV 

There are faeries ; verily ; 

Verily : 
For the old owl in the tree, 

Hollow tree, 
He who maketh melody 
For them tripping merrily. 

Told it me. 
There are faeries. — Verily, 

There are faeries. 



THE SPIRIT OF THE FOREST SPRING 

Over the rocks she trails her locks, 

Her mossy locks that drip, drip, drip : 

Her sparkling eyes smile at the skies 

In friendship-wise and fellowship : 

While the gleam and glance of her countenance 

Lull into trance the woodland places, 

As over the rocks she trails her locks. 

Her dripping locks that the long fern graces. 

She pours clear ooze from her heart's cool cruse, 

Its crystal cruse that drips, drips, drips : 

And all the day its limpid spray 

Is heard to play from her finger tips : 

And the slight, soft sound makes haunted ground 

Of the woods around that the sunlight laces, 

As she pours clear ooze from her heart's cool cruse, 

Its dripping cruse that no man traces. 

She swims and swims with glimmering limbs. 
With lucid limbs that drip, drip, drip : 
Where beechen boughs build a leafy house. 
Where her eyes may drowse or her beauty trip : 
133 



134 THE SPIRIT OF THE FOREST SPRING 

And the liquid beat of her rippHng feet 
Makes three times sweet the forest mazes, 
As she swims and swims with gUmmering limbs, 
With dripping Hmbs through the twilight hazes. 

Then wrapped in deeps of the wild she sleeps. 
She whispering sleeps and drips, drips, drips : 
Where moon and mist wreathe neck and wrist. 
And, starry-whist, through the dark she slips : 
While the heavenly dream of her soul makes gleam 
The falls that stream and the foam that races. 
As wrapped in the deeps of the wild she sleeps, 
She dripping sleeps or starward gazes. 



IN A GARDEN 

The pink rose drops its petals on 
The moonlit lawn, the moonlit lawn ; 
The moon, like some wide rose of white, 
Drops down the summer night. 

No rose there is 

As sweet as this — 
Thy mouth, that greets me with a kiss. 

The lattice of thy casement twines 
With jasmine vines, with jasmine vines ; 
The stars, like jasmine blossoms, lie 
About the glimmering sky. 
No jasmine tress 
Can so caress 
Like thy white arms' soft loveliness. 

About thy door magnoHa blooms 
Make sweet the glooms, make sweet the glooms ; 
A moon-magnolia is the dusk 
Closed in a dewy husk. 
However much, 
No bloom gives such 
Soft fragrance as thy bosom's touch. 
135 



136 IN A GARDEN 

The flowers blooming now will pass, 
And strew the grass, and strew the grass ; 
The night, like some frail flower, dawn 
Will soon make gray and wan. 

Still, still above, 

The flower of 
True love shall live forever, Love. 



IN THE LANE 

When the hornet hangs in the hollyhock, 
And the brown bee drones i' the rose ; 

And the west is a red-streaked four-o'clock, 
And summer is near its close — 

It's oh, for the gate and the locust lane. 

And dusk and dew and home again ! 

When the katydid sings and the cricket cries. 
And ghosts of the mists ascend ; 

And the evening star is a lamp i' the skies. 
And summer is near its end — 

It's oh, for the fence and the leafy lane. 

And the twilight peace and the tryst again ! 

When the owlet hoots in the dogwood tree, 
That leans to the rippling Run ; 

And the wind is a wildwood melody. 
And summer is almost done — 

It's oh, for the bridge and the bramble lane. 

And the fragrant hush and her hands again ! 

When fields smell sweet with the dewy hay. 
And woods are cool and wan, 
137 



138 IN THE LANE 

And a path for dreams is the Milky Way, 

And summer is nearly gone — 
It's oh, for the rock and the woodland lane, 
And the silence and stars and her lips again ! 

When the weight of the apples breaks down the 
boughs, 

And muskmelons split with sweet ; 
And the moon is a light in Heaven's house, 

And summer has spent its heat — 
It's oh, for the lane, the trysting lane. 
The deep-mooned night and her love again ! 



THE WINDOW ON THE HILL 

Among the fields the camomile 
Seems blown mist in the lightning's glare : 
Cool, rainy odors drench the air ; 
Night speaks above ; the angry smile 
Of storm within her stare. 

The way that I shall take to-night 
Is through the wood whose branches fill 
The road with double darkness, till. 
Between the boughs, a window's light 
Shines out upon the hill. 

The fence ; and then the path that goes 
Around a trailer-tangled rock. 
Through puckered pink and hollyhock, 
Unto a latch-gate's unkempt rose. 
And door whereat I knock. 

Bright on the oldtime flower place 
The lamp streams through the foggy pane ; 
The door is opened to the rain : 
And in the door — her happy face 
And outstretched arms again. 
139 



THE PICTURE 

Above her, pearl and rose the heavens lay : 
Around her, flowers flattered earth with gold, 
Or down the path in insolence held sway — 
Like cavaliers who ride the king's highway — 
Scarlet and buff, within a garden old. 

Beyond the hills, faint-heard through belts of wood, 
Bells, Sabbath-sweet, swooned from some far-off town 
Gamboge and gold, broad sunset colors strewed 
The purple west as if, with God imbued. 
Her mighty palette Nature there laid down. 

Amid such flowers, underneath such skies. 

Embodying all life knows of sweet and fair. 

She stood ; love's dreams in girlhood's face and eyes. 

Fair as a star that comes to emphasize 

The mingled beauty of the earth and air. 

Behind her, seen through vines and orchard trees. 
Gray with its twinkling windows — like the face 
Of calm old age that sits and dreams at ease — 
Porched with old roses, haunts of honeybees, 
The homestead loomed within a lilied space. 

140 



THE PICTURE 141 

For whom she waited in the afterglow, 
Star-eyed and golden 'mid the poppy and rose, 
I do not know ; I do not care to know, — 
It is enough I keep her picture so, 
Hung up, like poetry, in my life's dull prose. 

A fragrant picture, where I still may find 
Her face untouched of sorrow or regret, 
Unspoiled of contact ; ever young and kind ; 
The spiritual sweetheart of my soul and mind, 
She had not been, perhaps, if we had met. 



MOLY 

When by the wall the tiger-flower swings 
A head of sultry slumber and aroma ; 

And by the path, whereon the blown rose flings 
Its obsolete beauty, the long lilies foam a 

White place of perfume, like a beautiful breast — 

Between the pansy fire of the west, 

And poppy mist of moonrise in the east, 
Tliis heartache will have ceased. 

The witchcraft of soft music and sweet sleep — 

Let it beguile the burthen from my spirit. 
And white dreams reap me as strong reapers reap 

The ripened grain and full blown blossom near it ; 
Let me behold how gladness gives the whole 
The transformed countenance of my own soul — 
Between the sunset and the risen moon 
Let sorrow vanish soon. 

And these things then shall keep me company : 
The elfins of the dew ; the spirit of laughter 

Who haunts the wind ; the god of melody 

Who sings within the stream, that reaches after 
142 



MOLY 143 

The flow'rs that rock themselves to his caress : 
These of themselves shall shape my happmess, 
Whose visible presence I shall lean upon, 
Feeling that care is gone. 

Forgetting how the cankered flower must die ; 

The worm-pierced fruit fall, sickUed to its syrup ; 
How joy, begotten 'twixt a sigh and sigh. 

Waits with one foot forever in the stirrup, — 
Remembering how within the hollow lute 
Soft music sleeps when music's voice is mute ; 
And in the heart, when all seems black despair, 

Hope sits, awaiting there. 



POPPY AND MANDRAGORA 

Let us go far from here ! 
Here there is sadness in the early year : 
Here sorrow waits where joy went laughing late 
The sicklied face of heaven hangs like hate 
Above the woodland and the meadowland ; 
And Spring hath taken fire in her hand 
Of frost and made a dead bloom of her face, 
Which was a flower of marvel once and grace, 
And sweet serenity and stainless glow. 

Delay not. Let us go. 



Let us go far away 
Into the sunrise of a fairer May : 
Where all the nights resign them to the moon. 
And drug their souls with odor and soft tune, 
And tell their dreams in starlight : where the hours 
Teach immortality with fadeless flowers ; 
And all the day the bee weights down the bloom, 
And all the night the moth shakes strange perfume, 
Like music, from the flower-bells' affluence. 

Let us go far from hence. 
144 



POPPY AND MANDRAGORA 145 

Why should we sit and weep, 
And yearn with heavy eyelids still to sleep ? 
Forever hiding from our hearts the hate, — 
Death within death, — life doth accumulate, 
Like winter snows along the barren leas 
And sterile hills, whereon no lover sees 
The crocus limn the beautiful in flame ; 
Or hyacinth and jonquil write the name 
Of Love in fire, for each passer-by. 

Why should we sit and sigh ? 

We will not stay and long. 
Here where our souls are wasting for a song ; 
Where no bird sings ; and, dim beneath the stars, 
No silvery water strikes melodious bars ; 
And in the rocks and forest-covered hills 
No quick-tongued echo from her grotto fills 
With eery syllables the solitude — 
The vocal image of the voice that wooed — 
She, of wild sounds the airy looking-glass. 

Our souls are tired, alas ! 

What should we say to her ? — 
To Spring, who in our hearts makes no sweet stir : 
Who looks not on us nor gives thought unto : 
Too busy with the birth of flowers and dew. 



146 POPPY AND MANDRAGORA 

And vague gold wings within the chrysalis ; 
Or Love, who will not miss us ; had no kiss 
To give your soul or the sad soul of me, 
Who bound our hearts to her in poesy, 
Long since, and wear her badge of service still. — 
Have we not served our fill ? 

We will go far away. 
Song will not care, who slays our souls each day 
With the dark daggers of denying eyes, 
And lips of silence ! . . . Had she sighed us Hes, 
Not passionate, yet falsely tremulous. 
And lent her mouth to ours in mockery ; thus 
Smiled from calm eyes as if appreciative ; 
Then, then our love had taught itself to live 
Feeding itself on hope, and recompense. 

But no ! — So let us hence. 

So be the Bible shut 
Of all her Beauty, and her wisdom but 
A clasp for memory ! We will not seek 
The light that came not when the soul was weak 
With longing, and the darkness gave no sign 
Of star-born comfort. Nay ! why kneel and whine 
Sad psalms of patience and hosannas of 
Old hope and dreary canticles of love ? — 
Let us depart, since, as we long supposed, 

For us God's book was closed. 



A ROAD SONG 

It's — Oh, for the hills, where the wind's some one 
With a vagabond foot that follows ! 
And a cheer-up hand that he claps upon 
Your arm with the hearty words, "Come on ! 
We'll soon be out of the hollows, 

My heart ! 
We'll soon be out of the hollows." 

It's — Oh, for the songs, where the hope's some one 

With a renegade foot that doubles ! 

And a jolly lilt that he flings to the sun 

As he turns with the friendly laugh, " Come on ! 

We'll soon be out of the troubles. 

My heart ! 
We'll soon be out of the troubles !" 



147 



PHANTOMS 

This was her home ; one mossy gable thrust 
Above the cedars and the locust trees : 

This was her home, whose beauty now is dust, 
A lonely memory for melodies 
The wild birds sing, the wild birds and the bees. 

Here every evening is a prayer : no boast 

Or ruin of sunset makes the wan world wroth ; 

Here, through the twiHght, like a pale flower's ghost, 
A drowsy flutter, flies the tiger-moth ; 
And dusk spreads darkness Uke a dewy cloth. 

In vagabond velvet, on the placid day, 
A stain of crimson, lolls the butterfly ; 

The south wind sows with ripple and with ray 
The pleasant waters ; and the gentle sky 
Looks on the homestead like a quiet eye. 

Their melancholy quaver, lone and low. 

When day is done, the gray tree-toads repeat : 

The whippoorwills, far in the afterglow. 

Complain to silence : and the lightnings beat, 
In one still cloud, glimmers of golden heat. 
148 



PHANTOMS 149 

He comes not yet : not till the dusk is dead, 
And all the western glow is far withdrawn ; 

Not till, — a sleepy mouth love's kiss makes red, — 
The baby bud opes in a rosy yawn, 
Breathing sweet guesses at the dreamed-of dawn. 

When in the shadows, like a rain of gold, 
The fireflies stream steadily ; and bright 

Along the moss the glowworm, as of old, 
A crawling sparkle — Hke a crooked light 
In smoldering vellum — scrawls a square of night, — 

Then will he come ; and she will lean to him, — 

She, — the sweet phantom, — memory of that place, — 

Between the starHght and his eyes ; so dim 
With suave control and soul-compelHng grace, 
He cannot help but speak her, face to face. 



INTIMATIONS OF THE BEAUTIFUL 

I 

The liills are full of prophecies 

And ancient voices of the dead ; 

Of hidden shapes that no man sees, 

Pale, visionary presences. 

That speak the things no tongue hath said, 

No mind hath thought, no eye hath read. 

The streams are full of oracles. 

And momentary whisperings ; 

An immaterial beauty swells 

Its breezy silver o'er the shells 

With wordless speech that sings and sings 

The message of diviner things. 

No indeterminable thought is theirs. 
The stars', the sunsets' and the flowers'; 
Whose inexpressible speech declares 
Th' immortal Beautiful, who shares 
This mortal riddle which is ours. 
Beyond the forward-flying hours. 
150 



INTIMATIONS OF THE BEAUTIFUL 151 

II 

It holds and beckons in the streams ; 

It lures and touches us in all 

The flowers of the golden fall — 

The mystic essence of our dreams : 

A nymph blows bubbhng music where 

Faint water ripples down the rocks ; 

A faun goes dancing hoiden locks, 

And piping a Pandean air, 

Through trees the instant wind shakes bare. 

Our dreams are never otherwise 
Than real when they hold us so; 
We in some future life shall know 
Them parts of it and recognize 
Them as ideal substance, whence 
The actual is — (as flowers and trees, 
From color sources no one sees. 
Draw d3^es, the substance of a sense) — 
Material with intelligence. 

Ill 

What intimations made them wise. 
The mournful pine, the pleasant beech ? 
What strange and esoteric speech ? — 
(Communicated from the skies 



152 INTIMATIONS OF THE BEAUTIFUL 

In runic whispers) — that invokes 
The boles that sleep within the seeds, 
And out of narrow darkness leads 
The vast assemblies of the oaks. 

Within his knowledge, what one reads 

The poems written by the flowers ? 

The sermons, past all speech of ours, 

Preached by the gospel of the weeds ? — 

O eloquence of coloring ! 

O thoughts of syllabled perfume ! 

O beauty uttered into bloom ! 

Teach me your language ! let me sing ! 

IV 

Along my mind flies suddenly 

A wildwood thought that will not die ; 

That makes me brother to the bee. 

And cousin to the butterfly : 

A thought, such as gives perfume to 

The blushes of the bramble-rose. 

And, fixed in quivering crystal, glows 

A captive in the prismed dew. 

It leads the feet no certain way ; 
No frequent path of human feet : 
Its wild eyes follow me all day ; 
All day I hear its wild heart beat : 



INTIMATIONS OF THE BEAUTIFUL 153 

And in the night it sings and sighs 
The songs the winds and waters love ; 
Its wild heart lying tranced above, 
And tranced the wildness of its eyes. 



Oh, joy, to walk the way that goes 
Through woods of sweet-gum and of beech ! 
Where, Hke a ruby left in reach, 
The berry of the dogwood glows : 
Or where the bristling hillsides mass, 
'Tmxt belts of tawny sassafras. 
Brown shocks of corn in wigwam rows ! 

Where, in the hazy morning, runs 
The stony branch that pools and drips, 
The red-haws and the wild-rose hips 
Are strewn like pebbles ; and the sun's 
Own gold seems captured by the weeds ; 
To see, through scintillating seeds. 
The huuters steal with glimmering guns ! 

Oh, joy, to go the path which hes 
Through woodlands where the trees are tall ! 
Beneath the misty moon of fall. 
Whose ghostly girdle prophesies 



154 INTIMATIONS OF THE BEAUTIFUL 

A morn wind-swept and gray with rain ; 
When, o'er the lonely, leaf-blown lane, 
The night-hawk like a dead leaf flies ! 

To stand within the dewy ring 

Where pale death smites the boneset blooms, 

And everlasting's flowers, and plumes 

Of mint, with aromatic wing ! 

And hear the creek, — whose sobbing seems 

A wild-man murmuring in his dreams, — 

And insect viohns that sing. 

Or where the dim persimmon tree 
Rains on the path its frosty fruit. 
And in the oak the owl doth hoot, 
Beneath the moon and mist, to see 
The outcast Year go, — Hagar-wise, — 
With far-off, melancholy eyes. 
And lips that sigh for sympathy. 

VI 

Towards evening, where the sweet-gum flung 

Its thorny balls among the weeds. 

And where the milkweed's sleepy seeds, — 

A faery Feast of Lanterns, — swung ; 

The cricket tuned a plaintive lyre. 

And o'er the hills the sunset hung 

A purple parchment scrawled with fire. 



INTIMATIONS OF THE BEAUTIFUL 155 

From silver-blue to amethyst 

The shadows deepened in the vale ; 

And belt by belt the pearly-pale 

Aladdin fabric of the mist 

Built up its exhalation far ; 

A jewel on an Afrit's wrist, 

One star gemmed sunset's cinnabar. 

Then night drew near, as when, alone, 

The heart and soul grow intimate ; 

And on the hills the twilight sate 

With shadows, whose wild robes were sown 

With dreams and whispers ; — dreams, that led 

The heart once with love's monotone, 

And memories of the living-dead. 

VII 

All night the rain-gusts shook the leaves 

Around my window ; and the blast 

Rumbled the flickering flue, and fast 

The storm streamed from the dripping eaves. 

As if — 'neath skies gone mad with fear — ^ 

The witches' Sabboth galloped past. 

The forests leapt Hke startled deer. 

All night I heard the sweeping sleet ; 
And when the morning came, as slow 



156 INTIMATIONS OF THE BEAUTIFUL 

As wan affliction, with the woe 
Of all the world dragged at her feet, 
No spear of purple shattered through 
The dark gray of the east ; no bow 
Of gold shot arrows swift and blue. 

But rain, that whipj^ed the windows ; filled 
The spouts with rushings ; and around 
The garden stamped, and sowed the ground 
With limbs and leaves ; the wood-pool filled 
With overgurgling. — Bleak and cold 
The fields looked, where the footpath wound 
Through teasel and bur-marigold. 

Yet there's a kindness in such days 

Of gloom, that doth console regret 

With sympathy of tears, which wet 

Old eyes that watch the back-log blaze. — 

A kindness, alien to the deep 

Glad blue of sunny days that let 

No thought in of the lives that weep. 

VIII 

This dawn, through which the Autumn glowers, 
As might a face within our sleep. 
With stone-gray e3^es that weep and weep. 
And wet brows bound with sodden flowers, — 



INTIMATIONS OF THE BEAUTIFUL 157 

Is sunset to some sister land ; 

A land of ruins and of palms ; 

Rich sunset, crimson with long calms, — 

Whose burning belt low mountains bar, — 

That sees some brown Rebecca stand 

Beside a well the camel-band 

Winds down to 'neath the evening star. 

O sunset, sister to this dawn ! 

O dawn, whose face is turned away ! 

Who gazest not upon this day, 

But back upon the day that's gone ! 

Enamored so of loveliness, 

The retrospect of what thou wast, 

Oh, to thyself the present trust ! 

And as thy past be beautiful 

With hues, that never can grow less ! 

Waiting thy pleasure to express 

New beauty lest the world grow dull. 

IX 

Down in the woods a sorcerer, 
Out of rank rain and death, distills, — 
Through chill alembics of the air, — 
Aromas that brood everywhere 
Among the whisper-haunted hills : 
The bitter myrrh of dead leaves fills 



158 INTIMATIONS OF THE BEAUTIFUL 

Wet valleys (where the gaunt weeds bleach) 

With rainy scents of wood-decay ; — 

As if a spirit all the day 

Sat breathing softly 'neath the beech. 



With other eyes I see her flit, 
The wood-witch of the wild perfumes, 
Among her elfin owls, — that sit, 
A drowsy white, in crescent-lit 
Dim glens of opalescent glooms : — 
Where, for her magic, buds and blooms 
Mysterious perfumes, while she stands, 
A thornlike shadow, summoning 
The sleepy odors, that take wing 
Like bubbles from her dewy hands. 



X 

Among the woods they call to me — 

The lights that haunt the wood and stream ; 

Voices of such white ecstasy 

As moves with hushed lips through a dream : 

They stand in auraed radiances. 

Or flash with nimbused limbs across 

Their golden shadows on the moss. 

Or slip in silver through the trees. 



INTIMATIONS OF THE BEAUTIFUL 159 

What love can give the heart in me 
More hope and exaltation than 
The hand of light that tips the tree 
And beckons far from marts of man ? 
That reaches foamy fingers through 
The broken ripple, and repUes 
With sparkling speech of lips and eyes 
To souls who seek and still pursue. 



XI 

Give me the streams, that counterfeit 
The twilight of autumnal skies ; 
The shadowy, silent waters, Ht 
With fire like a woman's eyes ! 
Slow waters that, in autumn, glass 
The scarlet-strewn and golden grass. 
And drink the sunset's tawny dyes. 



Give me the pools, that lie among 
The centuried forests ! give me those, 
Deep, dim, and sad as darkness hung 
Beneath the sunset's somber rose : 
Still pools, in whose vague mirrors look 
Like ragged gypsies round a book 
Of magic — trees in wild repose. 



i6o INTIMATIONS OF THE BEAUTIFUL 

No quiet thing, or innocent, 
Of water, earth, or air shall please 
My soul now : but the violent 
Between the sunset and the trees : 
The fierce, the splendid, and intense, 
That love matures in innocence, 
Like mighty music, give me these ! 

XII 

When thorn-tree copses still were bare 
And black along the turbid brook ; 
When catkined willows blurred and shook 
Great tawny tangles in the air ; 
In bottomlands, the first thaw makes 
An oozy bog, beneath the trees, 
Prophetic of the spring that wakes, 
Sang the sonorous hylodes. 

Now that wild winds have stripped the thorn, 
And clogged with leaves the forest-creek ; 
Now that the woods look blown and bleak, 
And webs are frosty white at morn ; 
At night beneath the spectral sky, 
A far foreboding cry I hear — 
The wild fowl calling as they fly ? 
Or wild voice of the dying Year ? 



INTIMATIONS OF THE BEAUTIFUL i6i 

XIII 

And still my soul holds phantom tryst, 
When chestnuts hiss among the coals, 
Upon the Evening of All Souls, 
When all the night is moon and mist, 
And all the world is mystery ; 
I kiss dear lips that death hath kissed. 
And gaze in eyes no man may see. 
Filled with a love long lost to me. 

I hear the night-wind's ghostly glove 
Flutter the window : then the knob 
Of some dark door turn, with a sob 
As when love comes to gaze on love 
Who lies pale-coffined in a room : 
And then the iron gallop of 
The storm, who rides outside ; his plume 
Sweeping the night with dread and gloom. 

So fancy takes the mind, and paints 
The darkness with eidolon Hght, 
And writes the dead's romance in night 
On the dim Evening of All Saints : 
Unheard the hissing nuts ; the clink 
And fall of coals, whose shadow faints 
Around the hearts that sit and think. 
Borne far beyond the actual's brink. 



i62 INTIMATIONS OF THE BEAUTIFUL 

XIV 

I heard the wind, before the morn 

Stretched gaunt, gray fingers 'thwart my pane, 

Drive clouds down, a dark dragon-train ; 

Its iron visor closed, a horn 

Of steel from out the north it wound. — 

No morn like yesterday's ! whose mouth, 

A cool carnation, from the south 

Breathed through a golden reed the sound 

Of days that drop clear gold upon 

Cerulean silver floors of dawn. 

And all of yesterday is lost 

And swallowed in to-day's wild light — 

The birth deformed of day and night, 

The illegitimate, who cost 

Its mother secret tears and sighs ; 

Unlovely since unloved ; and chilled 

With sorrows and the shame that filled 

Its parents' love ; which was not wise 

In passion as the day and night 

That married yestermorn with light. 

XV 

Down through the dark, indignant trees, 

On indistinguishable wings 

Of storm, the wind of evening swings ; 



INTIMATIONS OF THE BEAUTIFUL 163 

Before its insane anger flees 
Distracted leaf and shattered bough : 
There is a rushing as when seas 
Of thunder beat an iron prow 
On reefs of wrath and roaring wreck : 
'Mid stormy leaves, a hurrying speck 
Of flickering blackness, driven by, 
A mad bat whirls along the sky. 

Like some sad shadow, in the eve's 

Deep melancholy — visible 

As by some strange and twilight spell — 

A gaunt girl stands among the leaves, 

The night- wind in her dolorous dress : 

Symbolic of the life that grieves, 

Of toil that patience makes not less, 

Her load of fagots fallen there. — 

A wilder shadow sweeps the air. 

And she is gone. . . . Was it the dumb 

Eidolon of the month to come ? 



XVI 

The song birds — are they flown away ? 
The song birds of the summer time. 
That sang their souls into the day, 
And set the laughing hours to rhyme. 



1 64 INTIMATIONS OF THE BEAUTIFUL 

No catbird scatters through the bush 
The sparkhng crystals of its song ; 
Within the woods no hermit- thrush 
Trails an enchanted flute along, 
Thridding with vocal gold the hush. 

All day the crows fly cawing past : 

The acorns drop : the forests scowl : 

At night I hear the bitter blast 

Hoot with the hooting of the owl. 

The wild creeks freeze : the ways are strewn 

With leaves that clog : beneath the tree 

The bird, that set its toil to tune, 

And made a home for melody. 

Lies dead beneath the snow-white moon. 



OCTOBER 

Far off a wind blew, and I heard 
Wild echoes of the woods reply — 

The herald of some royal word, 

With bannered trumpet, blown on high, 
Meseemed then passed me by : 

Who summoned marvels there to meet, 
With pomp, upon a cloth of gold ; 

Where berries of the bittersweet. 

That, splitting, showed the coals they fiold, 
Sowed garnets through the wold : 

Where, under tents of maples, seeds 

Of smooth carnelian, oval red. 
The spice-bush spangled : where, like beads. 

The dogwood's rounded rubies — fed 
With fire — ■ blazed and bled. 

And there I saw amid the rout 

Of months, in richness cavalier, 
A minnesinger — lips apout ; 

A gypsy face ; straight as a spear ; 
A rose stuck in his ear : 
165 



i66 OCTOBER 

Eyes, sparkling like old German wine, 

All mirth and moonlight ; naught to spare 
Of slender beard, that lent a line 
To his short lip ; October there, 
With chestnut curling hair. 

His brown baretta swept its plume 

Red through the leaves ; his purple hose, 

Puffed at the thighs, made gleam of gloom ; 
His tawny doublet, slashed with rose. 
And laced with crimson bows. 

Outshone the wahoo's scarlet pride. 
The haw, in rich vermilion dressed : 

A dagger dangling at his side, 
A slim lute, banded to his breast, 
Whereon his hands were pressed, 

I saw him come. . . . And, lo, to hear 
The lilt of his approaching lute, 

No wonder that the regnant Year 

Bent down her beauty, blushing mute,^ 
Her heart beneath his foot. 



FRIENDS 

Down through the woods, along the way 

That fords the stream ; by rock and tree, 

Where in the bramble-bell the bee 

Swings ; and through twilights green and gray 

The redbird flashes suddenly. 

My thoughts went wandering to-day. 

I found the fields where, row on row, 
The blackberries hang dark with fruit ; 
Where, nesting at the elder's root, 
The partridge whistles soft and low ; 
The fields, that billow to the foot 
Of those old hills we used to know. 

There lay the pond, all willow-bound. 

On whose bright face, when noons were hot, 

We marked the bubbles rise ; some plot 

To lure us in ; while all around 

Our heads, — hke faery fancies, — shot 

The dragonflies without a sound. 

The pond, above which evening bent 
To gaze upon her gypsy face ; 
Wherein the tv^inkling night would trace 
167 



i68 FRIENDS 

A vague, inverted firmament ; 

In which the green frogs tuned their bass, 

And firefly sparkles came and went. 

The oldtime place we often ranged, 

When we were playmates, you and I ; 

The oldtime fields, with boyhood's sky 

Still blue above them ! — Naught was changed 

Nothing. — Alas ! then, tell me why 

Should we be ? whom the years estranged. 



COMRADERY 

With eyes hand-arched he looks into 
The morning's face ; then turns away 
With truant feet, all wet with dew, 
Out for a holiday. 

The hill brook sings ; incessant stars, 
Foam-fashioned, on its restless breast ; 
And where he wades its water-bars 
Its song is happiest. 

A comrade of the chinquapin, 
He looks into its knotty eyes 
And sees its heart ; and, deep within, 
Its soul that makes him wise. 

The wood-thrush knows and follows him, 
Who whistles up the birds and bees ; 
And round him all the perfumes swim 
Of woodland loam and trees. 

Where'er he pass the silvery springs' 
Foam-people sing the flowers awake ; 
And sappy lips of bark-clad things 
Laugh ripe each berried brake. 
169 



I70 COMRADERY 

His touch is a companionship ; 
His word an old authority : 
He comes, a lyric on his lip, 
The woodboy — Poesy. 



BARE BOUGHS 

O HEART, — that beat the bird's bhthe blood, 
The blithe bird's strain, and understood 
The song it sang to leaf and bud, — 
What dost thou in the wood ? 

O soul, — that kept the brook's glad flow, 
The glad brook's word to sun and moon, — 
What dost thou here where song lies low. 
And dead the dreams of June ? 

Where once was heard a voice of song, 
The hautboys of the mad winds sing ; 
Where once a music flowed along, 
The rain's wild bugle's ring. 

The weedy water frets and ails. 
And moans in many a sunless fall ; 
And, o'er the melancholy, trails 
The black crow's eldritch call. 

Unhappy brook ! O withered wood ! 
O days, whom Death makes comrades of ! 
Where are the birds that thrilled the blood 
When Life struck hands with Love ? 
171 



172 BARE BOUGHS 

A song, one soared against the blue ; 
A song, one silvered in the leaves ; 
A song, one blew where orchards grew 
Gold-appled to the eaves. 

The birds are flown ; the flowers, dead ; 
And sky and earth are bleak and gray : 
Where Joy once went, all light of tread, 
Grief haunts the leaf -wild way. 



DAYS AND DAYS 

The days that clothed white limbs with heat, 
And rocked the red rose on their breast, 

Have passed with amber-sandaled feet 
Into the ruby-gated west. 

These were the days that filled the heart 

With overflowing riches of 
Life, in whose soul no dream shall start 

But hath its origin in love. 

Now come the days gray-huddled in 
The haze ; whose foggy footsteps drip ; 

Who pin beneath a gypsy chin 
The frosty marigold and hip. 

The days, whose forms fall shadowy 
Athwart the heart : whose misty breath 

Shapes saddest sweets of memory 
Out of the bitterness of death. 
173 



AUTUMN SORROW 

Ah me ! too soon the autumn comes 
Among these purple-plaintive hills ! 
Too soon among the forest gums 
Premonitory ilame she spills, 
Bleak, melancholy flame that kills. 

Her white fogs veil the morn, that rims 
With wet the moonflower's elfin moons ; 
And, like exhausted starlight, dims 
The last slim lily-disk ; and swoons 
With scents of hazy afternoons. 

Her gray mists haunt the sunset skies, 
And build the west's cadaverous fires, 
Where Sorrow sits with lonely eyes, 
And hands that wake an ancient lyre, 
Beside the ghost of dead Desire. 



174 



THE TREE-TOAD 



Secluded, solitary on some underbough, 
Or cradled in a leaf, 'mid glimmering light, 

Like Puck thou crouchest : Haply watching how 
The slow toadstool comes bulging, moony white, 
Through loosening loam ; or how, against the night, 

The glowworm gathers silver to endow 

The darkness with ; or how the dew conspires 
To hang, at dusk, with lamps of chilly fires 
Each blade that shrivels now. 

II 

O vague confederate of the whippoorwill. 
Of owl and cricket and the katydid ! 

Thou gatherest up the silence in one shrill 
Vibrating note and send'st it where, half hid 
In cedars, twilight sleeps — each azure lid 

Drooping a line of golden eyeball still. — 
Afar, yet near, I hear thy dewy voice 
Within the Garden of the Hours apoise 
On dusk's deep daffodil. 
175 



176 THE TREE-TOAD 



III 



Minstrel of moisture ! silent when high noon 

Shows her tanned face among the thirsting clover 

And parching meadows, thy tenebrious tune 
Wakes with the dew or when the rain is over. 
Thou troubadour of wetness and damp lover 

Of all cool things ! admitted comrade boon 
Of twihght's hush, and little intimate 
Of eve's first fluttering star and delicate 
Round rim of rainy moon ! 

IV 

Art trumpeter of Dwarfiand ? does thy horn 
Inform the gnomes and goblins of the hour 

When they may gambol under haw and thorn. 

Straddling each winking web and twinkling flower ? 
Or bell-ringer of Elfland ? whose tall tower 

The hriodendron is ? from whence is borne 
The elfin music of thy bell's deep bass, 
To summon Faeries to their starlit maze, 
To summon them or warn. 



THE CHIPMUNK 



He makes a roadway of the crumbling fence, 
Or on the fallen tree, — brown as a leaf 

Fall stripes with russet, — gambols down the dense 

Green twilight of the woods. We see not whence 
He comes, nor whither (in a time so brief) 

He vanishes — swift carrier of some Fay, 

Some pixy steed that haunts our child-belief — 

A goblin glimpr^e upon some wiidwood way. 



II 

What harlequin mood of nature qualified 

Him so with happiness ? and limbed him with 

Such young activity as winds, that ride 

The ripples, have, dancing on every side ? 

As sunbeams know, that urge the sap and pith 

Through hearts of trees ? yet made him to delight. 
Gnome-like, in darkness, — Hke a moonlight myth, 

Lairing in labyrinths of the under night. 
N 177 



178 THE CHIPMUNK 

III 

Here, by a rock, beneath the moss, a hole 
Leads to his home, the den wherein he sleeps ; 

Lulled by near noises of the laboring mole 

Tunneling its mine — like some ungainly Troll — 
Or by the tireless cricket there that keeps 

Picking its rusty and monotonous lute ; 

Or slower sounds of grass that creeps and creeps, 

And trees unrolling mighty root on root. 

IV 

Such is the music of his sleeping hours. 

Day hath another — 'tis a melody 
He trips to, made by the assembled flowers. 
And light and fragrance laughing 'mid the bowers, 

And ripeness busy with the acorn-tree. 
Such strains, perhaps, as filled with mute amaze 

(The silent music of Earth's ecstasy) 
The Satyr's soul, the Faun of classic days. 



THE WILD IRIS 

That day we wandered 'mid the hills, — so lone 
Clouds are not lonelier, the forest lay 

In emerald darkness round us. Many a stone 
And gnarly root, gray-mossed, made wild our way 

And many a bird the glimmering light along 

Showered the golden bubbles of its song. 

Then in the valley, where the brook went by, 
Silvering the ledges that it rippled from, — 

An isolated slip of fallen sky, 

Epitomizing heaven in its sum, — 

An iris bloomed — blue, as if, flower-disguised, 

The gaze of Spring had there materialized. 

I have forgotten many things since then — 
Much beauty and much happiness and grief ; 

And toiled and dreamed among my fellow-men, 
Rejoicing in the knowledge life is brief. 

'^'Tis winter now," so says each barren bough; 

And face and hair proclaim 'tis winter now. 
179 



i8o THE WILD IRIS 

I would forget the gladness of that spring ! 

I would forget that day when she and I, 
Between the bird-song and the blossoming, 

Went hand in hand beneath the soft May sky ! — 
Much is forgotten, yea — and yet, and yet. 
The things we would we never can forget. 

Nor I how May then minted treasuries 
Of crowfoot gold ; and molded out of light 

The sorrel's cups, whose elfin chalices 

Of limpid spar were streaked with rosy white : 

Nor all the stars of twinkling spiderwort. 

And mandrake moons with which her brows were girt. 

But most of all, yea, it were well for me, 
Me and my heart, that I forget that flower, 

The blue wild iris, azure fleur-de-lis, 
That she and I together found that hour. 

Its recollection can but emphasize 

The pain of loss, remindful of her eyes. 



DROUTH 



The hot sunflowers by the glaring pike 

Lift shields of sultry brass ; the teasel tops, 

Pink-thorned, advance with bristling spike on spike 
Against the furious sunhght. Field and copse 
Are sick with summer : now, with breathless stops, 

The locusts cymbal ; now grasshoppers beat 
Their castanets : and rolled in dust, a team, — 
Like some mean life wrapped in its sorry dream, — 

An empty wagon rattles through the heat. 

II 

Where now the blue wild iris ? flowers whose mouths 
Are moist and musky? Where the sweet-breathed 
mint, 

That made the brook-bank herby ? Where the South's 
Wild morning-glories, rich in hues, that hint 
At coming showers that the rainbows tint ? 

Where all the blossoms that the wildwood knows ? 
The frail oxalis hidden in its leaves ; 
The Indian-pipe, pale as a soul that grieves ; 

The freckled touch-me-not and forest rose. 

i8i 



i82 DROUTH 



III 



Dead ! dead ! all dead beside the drouth-burnt brook, 
Shrouded in moss or in the shriveled grass. 

Where waved their bells, from which the wild-bee 
shook 
The dewdrop once, — gaunt, in a nightmare mass, 
The rank weeds crowd; through which the cattle 
pass. 

Thirsty and lean, seeking some meager spring. 
Closed in with thorns, on which stray bits of wool 
The panting sheep have left, that sought the cool, 

From morn till evening wearily wandering. 

IV 

No bird is heard ; no throat to whistle awake 

The sleepy hush ; to let its m.usic leak 
Fresh, bubble-like, through bloom-roofs of the brake : 

Only the green-gray heron, famine-weak, — 

Searching the stale pools of the minnowless creek, — 
Utters its call ; and then the rain-crow, too. 

False prophet now, croaks to the stagnant air ; 

While overhead, — still as if painted there, — 
A buzzard hangs, black on the burning blue. 



RAIN 

Around, the stillness deepened ; then the grain 
Went wild with wind ; and every briery lane 
Was swept with dust ; and then, tempestuous black, 
Hillward the tempest heaved a monster back, 
That on the thunder leaned as on a cane ; 
And on huge shoulders bore a cloudy pack. 
That gullied gold from many a Hghtning-crack : 
One big drop splashed and wrinkled down the pane, 
And then field, hill, and wood were lost in rain. 

At last, through clouds, — as from a cavern hewn 
Into night's heart, — the sun burst angry roon ; 
And every cedar, with its weight of wet. 
Against the sunset's fiery splendor set, 
Frightened to beauty, seemed with rubies strewn : 
Then in drenched gardens, like sweet phantoms met. 
Dim odors rose of pink and mignonette ; 
And in the east a confidence, that soon 
Grew to the calm assurance of the moon. 



183 



AT SUNSET 

Into the sunset's turquoise marge 
The moon dips, like a pearly barge 
Enchantment sails through magic seas 
To faeryland Hesperides, 
Over the hills and away. 

Into the fields, in ghost-gray gown. 
The young-eyed Dusk comes slowly down ; 
Her apron filled with stars she stands, 
And one or two slip from her hands 
Over the hills and away. 

Above the wood's black caldron bends 
The witch-faced Night and, muttering, blends 
The dew and heat, whose bubbles make 
The mist and musk that haunt the brake 
Over the hills and away. 

Oh, come with me, and let us go 
Beyond the sunset lying Iovnt ; 
Beyond the twilight and the night, 
Into Love's kingdom of long light, 
Over the hills and away. 
184 



THE LEAF-CRICKET 



Small twilight singer 
Of dew and mist : thou ghost-gray, gossamer winger 

Of dusk's dim gHmm_er, 
How chill thy note sounds ; how thy wings of shimmer 

Vibrate, soft-sighing, 
Meseems, for Summer that is dead or dying. 

I stand and listen, 
And at thy song the garden-beds, that glisten 

With rose and lily. 
Seem touched with sadness ; and the tuberose chilly, 
Breathing around its cold and colorless breath. 
Fills the pale evening with wan hints of death. 

II 

I see thee quaintly 
Beneath the leaf ; thy shell-shaped winglets faintly — 

(As thin as spangle 
Of cobwebbed rain) — held up at airy angle ; 

I hear thy tinkle 
With faery notes the silvery stillness sprinkle ; 

i8s 



i86 THE LEAF-CRICKET 

Investing wholly 
The moonlight with divinest melancholy : 

Until, in seeming, 
I see the Spirit of Summer sadly dreaming 
Amid her ripened orchards, russet-strewn. 
Her great, grave eyes fixed on the harvest-moon. 

Ill 

As dewdrops beady ; 
As mist minute, thy notes ring low and reedy : 

The vaguest vapor 
Of melody, now near ; now, like some taper 

Of sound, far-fading — 
Thou will-o'-wisp of music aye evading. 

Among the bowxrs. 
The fog- washed stalks of Autumn's weeds and flowers, 

By hill and hollow, 
I hear thy murmur and in vain I follow — 
Thou jack-o'-lantern voice, thou pixy cry, 
Thou dirge, that tellest Beauty she must die. 

IV 

And when the frantic 
Wild winds of Autumn with the dead leaves antic ; 

And walnuts scatter 
The mire of lanes ; and dropping acorns patter 



THE LEAF-CRICKET 187 

In grove and forest, 
Like some frail grief with the rude blast thou warrest, 

Sending thy slender 
Far cry against the gale, that, rough, untender, 

Untouched of sorrow, 
Sweeps thee aside, where, haply, I to-morrow 
Shall find thee lying — tiny, cold and crushed, 
Thy weak wings folded and thy music hushed. 



THE WIND OF WINTER 

The Winter Wind, the wind of death, 

Who knocked upon my door, 
Now through the keyhole entereth, 

Invisible and hoar : 
He breathes around his icy breath 

And treads the flickering floor. 

I heard him, wandering in the night, 

Tap at m.y windowpane ; 
With ghostly fingers, snowy white, 

I heard him tug in vain, 
Until the shuddering candlelight 

Did cringe with fear and strain. 

The fire, awakened by his voice, 

Leapt up with frantic arms. 
Like some wild babe that greets with noise 

Its father home who storms. 
With rosy gestures that rejoice. 

And crimson kiss that warms. 

Now in the hearth he sits and, drowned 
Among the ashes, blows ; 
i88 



THE WIND OF WINTER 189 

Or through the room goes stealing round 

On cautious-creeping toes, 
Deep-mantled in the drowsy sound 

Of night that sleets and snows. 

And oft, like some thin faery-thing, 

The stormy hush amid, 
I hear his captive trebles sing 

Beneath the kettle's lid ; 
Or now a harp of elfland string 

In some dark cranny hid. 

Again I hear him, implike, whine, 

Cram.ped in the gusty flue ; 
Or knotted in the resinous pine 

Raise goblin cry and hue. 
While through the smoke his eyeballs shine, 

A sooty red and blue. 

At last I hear him, nearing dawn, 

Take up his roaring broom. 
And sweep wild leaves from wood and lawn, 

And from the heavens the gloom, 
To show the gaunt world lying wan, 

And morn's cold rose a-bloom. 



THE OWLET 



When dusk is drowned in drowsy dreams, 
And slow the hues of sunset die ; 
When firefly and moth go by, 
And in still streams the new moon seems 
Another moon and sky : 
Then fromx the hills there comes a cry, 
The owlet's cry : 
A shivering voice that sobs and screams, 
With terror screams : — 

*' Who is it, who is it, who-o-o ? 
Who rides through the dusk and dew, 

With a pair of horns, 

As thin as thorns. 
And face a bubble-blue ? — 

Who, who, who ! 
Who is it, who is it, who-o-o ?" 

II 

When night has dulled the lily's white. 
And opened wide the moonflower's eyes ; 
190 



THE OWLET 191 

When pale mists rise and veil the skies, 
And round the height in whispering flight 
The night- wind sounds and sighs : 
Then in the wood again it cries, 
The owlet cries : 
A shivering voice that calls in fright. 
In maundering fright : — 

''Who is it, who is it, who-o-o ? 
Who walks with a shuffling shoe 

'Mid the gusty trees. 

With a face none sees. 
And a form as ghostly, too ? — 

Who, who, who ! 
Who is it, who is it, who-o-o ? " 



III 

When midnight leans a listening ear 
And tinkles on her insect lutes ; 
When 'mid the roots the cricket flutes. 
And marsh and mere, now far, now near, 
A jack-o'-lantern foots : 
Then o'er the pool again it hoots, 
The owlet hoots : 
A voice that shivers as with fear, 
That cries with fear : — 



192 THE OWLET 

"Who is it, who is it, who-o-o ? 

Who creeps with his glowworm crew 
Above the mire 
With a corpse-Hght fire, 

As only dead men do ? — 
Who, who, who ! 

Who is it, who is it, who-o-o ? " 



EVENING ON THE FARM 

From out the hills where twilight stands, 
Above the shadowy pasture lands, 
With strained and strident cry, 
Beneath pale skies that sunset bands, 
The bull-bats fly. 

A cloud hangs over, strange of shape, 
And, colored like the half-ripe grape, 
Seems some uneven stain 
On heaven's azure ; thin as crape. 
And blue as rain. 

By ways, that sunset's sardonyx 
O'erflares, and gates the farm-boy clicks, 
Through which the cattle came, 
The mullein-stalks seem giant wicks 
Of downy flame. 

From woods no glimmer enters in. 
Above the streams that, wandering, win 
To where the wood pool bids, 
Those haunters of the dusk begin, — 
The katydids. 

o 193 



194 



EVENING ON THE FARM 

Adown the dark the firefly marks 
Its flight in gold and emerald sparks ; 
And, loosened from his chain, 
The shaggy mastiff bounds and barks, 
And barks again. 

Each breeze brings scents of hill-heaped hay ; 
And now an owlet, far away, 
Cries twice or thrice, ''T-o-o-w-h-o-o" ; 
And cool dim moths of mottled gray 
Flit through the dew. 

The silence sounds its frog-bassoon, 
Where, on the woodland creek's lagoon, — 
Pale as a ghostly girl 

Lost 'mid the trees, — looks down the moon 
With face of pearl. 

Within the shed where logs, late hewed, 
Smell forest-sweet, and chips of wood 
Make blurs of white and brown. 
The brood-hen cuddles her warm brood 
Of teetering down. 

The clattering guineas in the tree 
Din for a time ; and quietly 



EVENING ON THE FARM 195 

The henhouse, near the fence, 
Sleeps, save for some brief rivahy 
Of cocks and hens. 



A cowbell tinkles by the rails. 
Where, streaming white in foaming pails, 
Milk makes an uddery sound ; 
While overhead the black bat trails 
Around and round. 

The night is still. The slow cows chew 
A drowsy cud. The bird that flew 
And sang is in its nest. 
It is the time of falling dew, 
Of dreams and rest. 

The beehives sleep ; and round the walk, 
The garden path, from stalk to stalk 
The bungling beetle booms, 
Where two soft shadows stand and talk 
Among the blooms. 

The stars are thick : the light is dead 
That dyed the west : and Drowsyhead, 
Tuning his cricket-pipe. 
Nods, and some apple, round and red, 
Drops over-ripe. 



196 EVENING ON THE FARM 

Now down the road, that shambles by, 
A window, shining hke an eye 
Through climbing rose and gourd, 
Shows Age and young Rusticity 
Seated at board. 



THE LOCUST 

Thou pulse of hotness, who, with reedlike breast, 
Makest meridian music, long and loud, 

Accentuating summer ! — Dost thy best 
To make the sunbeams fiercer, and to crowd 

With lonesomeness the long, close afternoon — 

When Labor leans, swart-faced and beady-browed, 

Upon his sultry scythe — thou tangible tune 
Of heat, whose waves incessantly arise 
Quivering and clear beneath the cloudless skies. 

Thou singest, and upon his haggard hills 

Drouth yawns and rubs his heavy eyes and wakes ; 

Brushes the hot hair from his face ; and fills 
The land with death as sullenly he takes 

Downward his dusty way. 'Midst woods and fields 
At every pool his burning thirst he slakes : 

No grove so deep, no bank so high it shields 
A spring from him ; no creek evades his eye : 
He needs but look and they are withered dry. 

Thou singest, and thy song is as a spell 

Of somnolence to charm the land with sleep ; 
197 



igS THE LOCUST 

A thorn of sound that pierces dale and dell, 
Diffusing slumber over vale and steep. 

Sleepy the forest, nodding sleepy boughs ; 
Sleepy the pastures with their sleepy sheep : 

Sleepy the creek where sleepily the cows 

Stand knee-deep ; and the very heaven seems 
Sleepy and lost in undetermined dreams. 

Art thou a rattle that Monotony, 

Summer's dull nurse, old sister of slow Time, 

Shakes for Day's peevish pleasure, who in glee 
Takes its discordant music for sweet rhyme ? 

Or oboe that the Summer Noontide plays. 
Sitting with Ripeness 'neath the orchard tree. 

Trying repeatedly the same shrill phrase. 
Until the musky peach with weariness 
Drops, and the hum of murmuring bees grows less ? 



THE DEAD DAY 

The west builds high a sepulcher 
Of cloudy granite and of gold, 

Where twilight's priestly hours inter 
The Day like some great king of old. 

A censer, rimmed with silver fire, 

The new moon swings above his tomb ; 

While, organ-stops of God's own choir, 
Star after star throbs in the gloom. 

And Night draws near, the sadly sweet — 
A nun whose face is calm and fair — 

And kneeling at the dead Day's feet 
Her soul goes up in mists like prayer. 

In prayer, we feel through dewy gleam 
And flowery fragrance, and — above 

All earth — the ecstasy and dream 

That haunt the mystic heart of love. 



199 



THE OLD WATER-MILL 

Wild ridge on ridge the wooded hills arise, 

Between whose breezy vistas gulfs of skies 

Pilot great clouds like towering argosies, 

And hawk and buzzard breast the azure breeze. 

With many a foaming fall and glimmering reach 

Of placid murmur, under elm and beech. 

The creek goes twinkling through long gleams and 

glooms 
Of woodland quiet, summered with perfumes : 
The creek, in whose clear shallows minnow-schools 
Glitter or dart ; and by whose deeper pools 
The blue kingfishers and the herons haunt ; 
That, often startled from the freckled flaunt 
Of blackberry-lihes — where they feed or hide — 
Trail a lank fhght along the forestside 
With eery clangor. Here a sycamore 
Smooth, wave-uprooted, builds from shore to shore 
A headlong bridge ; and there, a storm-hurled oak 
Lays a long dam, where sand and gravel choke 
The water's lazy way. Here mistflower blurs 
Its bit of heaven ; there the ox-eye stirs 
Its gloaming hues of pearl and gold ; and here, 
A gray, cool stain, like dawn's own atmosphere. 



THE OLD WATER-MILL 201 

The dim wild carrot lifts its crumpled crest : 
And over all, at slender flight or rest, 
The dragonflies, like coruscating rays 
Of lapis-lazuli and chrysoprase, 
Drowsily sparkle through the summer days : 
And, dewlap-deep, here from the noontide heat 
The bell-hung cattle find a cool retreat ; 
And through the willows girdling the hill. 
Now far, now near, borne as the soft winds will, 
Comes the low rushing of the water-mill. 

Ah, lovely to me from a little child, 
How changed the place ! wherein once, undefiled, 
The glad communion of the sky and stream 
Went with me like a presence and a dream. 
Where once the brambled meads and orchardlands, 
Poured ripe abundance down with mellow hands 
Of summer ; and the birds of field and wood 
Called to me in a tongue I understood ; 
And in the tangles of the old rail-fence 
Even the insect tumult had some sense, 
And every sound a happy eloquence : 
And more to me than wisest books can teach 
The wind and water said ; whose words did reach 
My soul, addressing their magnificent speech, — 
Raucous and rushing, — from the old mill-wheel, 
That made the rolling mill-cogs snore and reel, 



202 THE OLD WATER-MILL 

Like some old ogre in a faerytale 
Nodding above his meat and mug of ale. 

How memory takes me back the ways that lead — 

As when a boy — through woodland and through mead ! 

To orchards fruited ; or to fields in bloom ; 

Or briery fallows, like a mighty room, 

Through which the winds swing censers of perfume, 

And where deep blackberries spread miles of fruit ; — 

A wildwood feast, that stayed the plowboy's foot 

When to the tasseling acres of the corn 

He drove his team, fresh in the primrose morn ; 

And from the liberal banquet, nature lent. 

Plucked dewy handfuls as he whistling went. — 

A boy once more, I stand with sunburnt feet 

And watch the harvester sweep down the wheat ; 

Or laze with warm limbs in the unstacked straw 

Near by the thresher, whose insatiate maw 

Devours the sheaves, hot-drawling out its hum — 

Like some great sleepy bee, above a bloom. 

Made drunk with honey — while, grown big with grain, 

The bulging sacks receive the golden rain. 

Again I tread the valley, sweet with hay. 

And hear the bobwhite calling far away. 

Or wood-dove cooing in the elder-brake ; 

Or see the sassafras bushes madly shake 



,.^ 



THE OLD WATER-MILL 203 

As swift, a rufous instant, in the glen 
The red fox leaps and gallops to his den : 
Or, standing in the violet-colored gloam, 
Hear roadways sound with hoUday riding home 
From church or fair, or country barbecue. 
Which half the county to some village drew. 

How spilled with berries were its summer hills, 
And strewn with walnuts all its autumn rills ! — 
And chestnuts too ! burred from the spring's long 

flowers ; 
June's, when their tree-tops streamed delirious showers 
Of blossoming silver, cool, crepuscular, 
i^d like a nebulous radiance shone afar. — 
And maples ! how their sappy hearts would pour 
Rude troughs of syrup, when the winter hoar 
Steamed with the sugar-kettle, day and night, 
And, red, the snow was streaked with firelight. 
Then it was glorious ! the mill-dam's edge 
One slope of frosty crystal, laid a ledge 
Of pearl across ; above which, sleeted trees 
Tossed arms of ice, that, clashing in the breeze, 
Tinkled the ringing creek with icicles, 
Thin as the peal of far-off elfin bells : 
A sound that in my city dreams I hear. 
That brings before me, under skies that clear, 
The old mill in its winter garb of snow, 



204 THE OLD WATER-MILL 

Its frozen wheel like a hoar beard below, 
And its west windows, two deep eyes aglow. 

Ah, ancient mill, still do I picture o'er 

Thy cobwebbed stairs and loft and grain-strewn floor ; 

Thy door, — like some brown, honest hand of toil, 

And honorable with service of the soil, — 

Forever open ; to which, on his back 

The prosperous farmer bears his bursting sack, 

And while the miller measures out his toll. 

Again I hear, above the cogs' loud roll, — 

That makes stout joist and rafter groan and sway, — 

The harmless gossip of the passing day : 

Good country talk, that says how so-and-so 

Lived, died, or wedded : how curculio 

And codling-moth play havoc with the fruit. 

Smut ruins the corn and blight the grapes to boot : 

Or what is news from town : next county fair : 

How well the crops are looking everywhere : — 

Now this, now that, on which their interests fix, 

Prospects for rain or frost, and poHtics. 

Wliile, all around, the sweet smell of the meal 

Filters, warm-pouring from the rolling wheel 

Into the bin ; beside which, mealy white. 

The miller looms, dim^ in the dusty light. 

Again I see the miller's home between 

The crinkling creek and hills of beechen green : 



THE OLD WATER-MILL 205 

Again the miller greets me, gaunt and brown, 

Who oft o'erawed my boyhood with his frown 

And gray-browed mien : again he tries to reach 

My youthful soul with fervid scriptural speech. — 

For he, of all the countryside confessed, 

The most religious was and goodliest ; 

A Methodist, who at all meetings led ; 

Prayed with his family ere they went to bed. 

No books except the Bible had he read — 

At least so seemed it to my younger head. — 

All things of Heaven and Earth he'd prove by this, 

Be it a fact or mere hypothesis : 

For to his simple wisdom, reverent, 

"r//e Bible says'' was all of argument. — 

God keep his soul ! his bones were long since laid 

Among the sunken gravestones in the shade 

Of those dark-lichened rocks, that wall around 

The family burying-ground with cedars crowned : 

Where bristling teasel and the brier combine 

With clambering wood-rose and the wildgrape-vine 

To hide the stone whereon his name and dates 

Neglect, with mossy hand, obliterates. 



ARGONAUTS . 

With argosies of dawn he sails, 

And triremes of the dusk, 
The Seas of Song, whereon the gales 

Are myths that trail wild musk. 

He hears the hail of Siren bands 
From headlands sunset-kissed ; 

The Lotus-eaters wave pale hands 
Within a land of mist. 

For many a league he hears the roar 

Of the Symplegades ; 
And through the far foam of its shore 

The Isle of Sappho sees. 

All day he looks, with hazy lids, 
At gods who cleave the deep ; 

All night he hears the Nereids 
Sing their wild hearts asleep. 

When heaven thunders overhead, 
And hell upheaves the Vast, 

Dim faces of the ocean's dead 
Gaze at him from each mast. 
206 



ARGONAUTS 207 

He but repeats the oracle 

That bade him first set sail ; 
And cheers his soul with, ''All is well ! 

Go on ! I will not fail." 

Behold ! he sails no earthly bark 

And on no earthly sea, 
Who down the years into the dark, — 

Divine of destiny, — 

Holds to his purpose, — ships of Greece, — 

Ideal-steered afar. 
For whom awaits the Golden Fleece, 

The fame that is his star. 



"THE MORN THAT BREAKS ITS HEART OF 
GOLD " 

From an ode " In Commemoration of the Founding of the 
Massachusetts Bay Colony." 

The morn that breaks its heart of gold 
Above the purple hills ; 
The eve, that spills 

Its nautilus splendor where the sea is rolled ; 
The night, that leads the vast procession in 
Of stars and dreams, — 
The beauty that shall never die or pass : — 
The winds, that spin 
Of rain the misty mantles of the grass. 
And thunder raiment of the mountain-streams ; 
The sunbeams, penciling with gold the dusk 
Green cowls of ancient woods ; 
The shadows, thridding, veiled with musk, 
The moon-pathed solitudes. 
Call to my Fancy, saying, "Follow ! follow !" 
Till, following, I see, — 
Fair as a cascade in a rainbowed hollow, — 
A dream, a shape, take form. 
Clad on with every charm, — 
208 



"MORN THAT BREAKS ITS HEART" 209 

The vision of that IdeaHty, 

Which lured the pioneer in wood and hill, 

And beckoned him from earth and sky ; 

The dream that cannot die, 

Their children's children did fulfill. 

In stone and iron and wood, 

Out of the solitude, 

And by a stalwart act 

Create a mighty fact — 

A Nation, now that stands 

Clad on with hope and beauty, strength and song. 

Eternal, young and strong. 

Planting her heel on wrong. 

Her starry banner in triumphant hands. . . . 

Within her face the rose 

Of Alleghany dawns ; 

Limbed with Alaskan snows, 

Floridian starlight in her eyes, — 

Eyes stern as steel yet tender as a fawn's, — 

And in her hair 

The rapture of her rivers ; and the dare. 

As perishless as truth. 

That o'er the crags of her Sierras flies. 

Urging the eagle ardor through her veins. 

Behold her where. 

Around her radiant youth, 



210 "MORN THAT BREAKS ITS HEART" 

The spirits of the cataracts and plains, 

The genii of the floods and forests, meet. 

In rainbow mists circling her brow and feet : 

The forces vast that sit 

In session round her ; powers paraclete, 

That guard her presence ; awful forms and fair, 

Making secure her place ; 

Guiding her surely as the worlds through space 

Do laws sidereal ; edicts, thunder-lit, 

Of skyed eternity, in splendor borne 

On planetary wings of night and morn. 



From her high place she sees 

Her long procession of accompHshed acts, 

Cloud- winged refulgences 

Of thoughts in steel and stone, of marble dreams, 

Lift up tremendous battlements. 

Sun-blinding, built of facts ; 

While in her soul she seems. 

Listening, to hear, as from innumerable tents, 

iEonian thunder, wonder, and applause 

Of all the heroic ages that are gone ; 

Feeling secure 

That, as her Past, her Future shall endure, 

As did her Cause 

When redly broke the dawn 



''MORN THAT BREAKS ITS HEART" 211 

Of fierce rebellion, and, beneath its star, 

The firmaments of war 

Poured down infernal rain. 

And North and South lay bleeding mid their slain. 

And now, no less, shall her great Cause prevail, 

More so in peace than war. 

Through the thrilled wire and electric rail, 

Carrying her message far : 

Shaping her dream 

Within the brain of steam. 

That, with a myriad hands. 

Labors unceasingly, and knits her lands 

In firmer union ; joining plain and stream 

With steel ; and binding shore to shore 

With bands of iron ; — nerves and arteries, 

Along whose adamant forever pour 

Her concrete thoughts, her tireless energies. 



A VOICE ON THE WIND 



She walks with the wind on the windy height 
When the rocks are loud and the waves are white, 
And all night long she calls through the night, 

"O my children, come home !" 
Her bleak gown, torn as a tattered cloud. 
Tosses around her like a shroud, 
While over the deep her voice rings loud, — 

"O my children, come home, come home ! 

O my children, come home ! " 

II 

Who is she who wanders alone, 

When the wind drives sheer and the rain is blown ? 

Who walks all night and makes her moan, 

''O my children, come home !" 
Whose face is raised to the blinding gale ; 
Whose hair blows black and whose eyes are pale, 
While over the world goes by her wail, — 

''O my children, come home, come home ! 

O my children, come home !" 



A VOICE ON THE WIND 213 

III 

She walks with the wind in the windy wood ; 
The dark rain drips from her hair and hood, 
And her cry sobs by, Uke a ghost pursued, 

''Omy children, come home !" 
Where the trees loom gaunt and the rocks stretch drear, 
The owl and the fox crouch back with fear. 
As wild through the wood her voice they hear, — 

"O my children, come home, come home ! 

O my children, come home !" 

IV 

Who is she who shudders by 

When the boughs blow bare and the dead leaves fly ? 

Who walks all night with her waihng cry, 

"0 my children, come home !" 
Who, strange of look, and wild of tongue. 
With wan feet wounded and hands wild-wrung, 
Sweeps on and on with her cry, far-flung, — 

"O my children, come home, come home ! 

O my children, come home ! " 



V 

'Tis the Spirit of Autumn, no man sees, 
The mother of Death and of Mysteries, 



214 A VOICE ON THE WIND 

Who cries on the wind all night to these, 
''O my children, come home !" 

The Spirit of Autumn, pierced with pain. 

Calling her children home again, 

Death and Dreams, through ruin and rain, — 
^'O my children, come home, come home ! 
O my children, come home !" 



REQUIEM 

I 

No more for him, where hills look down, 

Shall Morning crown 
Her rainy brow with blossom bands ! — 
The Morning Hours, whose rosy hands 
Drop wildfiowers of the breaking skies 
Upon the sod 'neath which he lies. — 
No more for him ! No more ! No more ! 

II 

No more for him, where waters sleep, 

Shall Evening heap 
The long gold of the perfect days ! 
The Eventide, whose warm hand lays 
Great poppies of the afterglow 
Upon the turf he rests below. — 
No more for him ! No more ! no more ! 

Ill 

No more for him, where woodlands loom. 
Shall Midnight bloom 

215 



2i6 REQUIEM 

The star-flowered acres of the blue ! 
The Midnight Hours, whose dim hands strew 
Dead leaves of darkness, hushed and deep, 
Upon the grave where he doth sleep. — 
No more for him ! No more ! No more ! 

IV 

The hills, that Morning's footsteps wake : 

The waves that take 
A brightness from the Eve ; the woods 
And solitudes, o'er which Night broods. 
Their Spirits have, whose parts are one 
With him, whose mortal part is done. 

Whose part is done. 



LYNCHERS 

At the moon's down-going let it be 

On the quarry hill with its one gnarled tree. 

The red-rock road of the underbrush, 

Where the woman came through the summer hush. 

The sumac high and the elder thick, 

Where we found the stone and the ragged stick. 

The trampled road of the thicket, full 
Of footprints down to the quarry pool. 

The rocks that ooze wdth the hue of lead, 
Where we found her lying stark and dead. 

The scraggy wood ; the negro hut, 

With its doors and windows locked and shut. 

A secret signal ; a foot's rough tramp ; 
A knock at the door ; a Hfted lamp. 

An oath ; a scufSe ; a ring of masks ; 
A voice that answers a voice that asks. 
217 



2i8 LYNCHERS 

A group of shadows ; the moon's red fleck ; 
A running noose and a man's bared neck. 

A word, a curse, and a shape that swings ; 
The lonely night and a bat's black wings. 

At the moon's down-going let it be 

On the quarry hill with its one gnarled tree. 



THE PARTING 

She passed the thorn-trees, whose gaunt branches tossed 
Their spider-shadows round her ; and the breeze, 
Beneath the ashen moon, was full of frost, 
And mouthed and mumbled to the sickly trees, 
Like some starved hag who sees her children freeze. 

Dry-eyed she waited by the sycamore. 
Some stars made misty blotches in the sky. 
And all the wretched willows on the shore 
Looked faded as a jaundiced cheek or eye. 
She felt their pity and could only sigh. 

And then his skiff ground on the river rocks. 
WhistUng he came into the shadow made 
By that dead tree. He kissed her dark brown locks ; 
And round her form his eager arms were laid. 
Passive she stood, her secret unbetrayed. 

And then she spoke, while still his greeting kiss 
Ached in her hair. She did not dare to Hft 
Her eyes to his — her anguished eyes to his, 
While tears smote crystal in her throat. One rift 
Of weakness humored might set all adrift. 

219 



220 THE PARTING 

Anger and shame were his. She meekly heard. 
And then the oar-locks sounded, and her brain 
Remembered he had said no farewell word ; 
And wild emotion swept her ; and again 
Left her as silent as a carven pain. 

She, in the old sad farmhouse, wearily 
Resumed the drudgery of her common lot. 
Regret remembering. — 'Midst old vices, he, 
Who would have trod on, and somehow did not. 
The wildfiower, that had brushed his feet, forgot. 



FEUD 

A MILE of lane, — hedged high with ironweeds 
And dying daisies, — white with sun, that leads 
Downward into a wood ; through which a stream 

Steals like a shadow ; over which is laid 
A bridge of logs, worn deep by many a team, 

Sunk in the tangled shade. 

Far off a wood-dove lifts its lonely cry; 

And in the sleepy silver of the sky 

A gray hawk wheels no larger than a hand. — 

From point to point the road grows worse and worse, 
Until that place is reached where all the land 

Seems burdened with some curse. 

A ragged fence of pickets, warped and sprung, — 
On which the fragments of a gate are hung, — 
Divides a hill, the fox and ground-hog haunt, 

A wilderness of briers ; o'er whose tops 
A battered barn is seen, low-roofed and gaunt, 

'Mid fields that know no crops. 



222 FEUD 

Fields over which a path, o'erwhelmed with burrs 
And ragweeds, noisy with the grasshoppers, 
Leads, — lost, irresolute as paths the cows 

Wear through the woods, — unto a woodshed ; then, 
With wrecks of windows, to a huddled house. 

Where men have murdered men. 

A house, whose tottering chimney, clay and rock, 
Is seamed and crannied ; whose lame door and lock 
Are bullet-bored ; around which, there and here, 

Are sinister stains. — One dreads to look around. — 
The place seems thinking of that time of fear 

And dares not breathe a sound. 

Within is emptiness : The sunlight falls . 

On faded journals papering the walls ; 

On advertisement chromos, torn with time. 

Around a hearth where wasps and spiders build. — 
The house is dead : meseems that night of crime 

It, too, was shot and killed. 



KU KLUX 

We have sent him seeds of the melon's core, 
And nailed a warning upon his door : 
By the Ku Klux laws we can do no more. 

Down in the hollow, 'mid crib and stack, 
The roof of his low-porched house looms black ; 
Not a line of light at the door-sill's crack. 

Yet arm and mount ! and mask and ride ! 

The hounds can sense though the fox may hide ! 

And for a word too much men oft have died. 



The clouds blow heavy toward the moon. 
The edge of the storm will reach it soon. 
The kildee cries and the lonesome loon. 



The clouds shall flush with a wilder glare 
Than the Hghtning makes with its angled flare, 
When the Ku Klux verdict is given there. 

In the pause of the thunder rolHng low, 
A rifle's answer — who shall know 
From the wind's fierce hurl and the rain's black blow ? 

223 



224 KU KLUX 

Only the signature, written grim 

At the end of the message brought to him — 

A hempen rope and a twisted Hmb. 

So arm and mount ! and mask and ride ! 

The hounds can sense though the fox may hide ! 

For a w^ord too much men oft have died. 



EIDOLONS 

The white moth-mullein brushed its slim 
Cool, faery flowers against his knee ; 

In places where the way lay dim 
The branches, arching suddenly, 

Made tomblike mystery for him. 

The wild-rose and the elder, drenched 
With rain, made pale a misty place, — 

From which, as from a ghost, he blenched ; 
He walking with averted face. 

And lips in desolation clenched. 

For far within the forest, — where 

Weird shadows stood like phantom men, 

And where the ground-hog dug its lair, 
The she-fox whelped and had her den, — 

The thing kept calling, buried there. 

One dead trunk, like a ruined tower, 

Dark-green with toppling trailers, shoved 

Its wild wreck o'er the bush ; one bower 
Looked like a dead man, capped and gloved. 

The one who haunted him each hour. 

225 



2 26 EIDOLONS 

Now at his side he heard it : thin 
As echoes of a thought that speaks 

To conscience. Listening with his chin 
Upon his palm, against his cheeks 

He felt the moon's white finger win. 

And now the voice was still : and lo, 

With eyes that stared on naught but night, 

He saw ? — what none on earth shall know ! - 
Was it the face that far from sight 

Had lain here, buried long ago ? 

But men who found him, — thither led 
By the wild fox, — within that place 

Read in his stony eyes, 'tis said. 
The thing he saw there, face to face, 

The thing that left him staring dead. 



THE MAN HUNT 

The woods stretch deep to the mountain side, 
And the brush is wild where a man may hide. 

They have brought the bloodhounds up again 
To the roadside rock where they found the slain. 

They have brought the bloodhounds up, and they 
Have taken the trail to the mountain way. 

Three times they circled the trail and crossed ; 
And thrice they found it and thrice they lost. 

Now straight through the trees and the underbrush 
They follow the scent through the forest's hush. 

And their deep-mouthed bay is a pulse of fear 
In the heart of the wood that the man must hear. 

The man who crouches among the trees 
From the stern-faced men who follow these. 

A huddle of rocks that the ooze has mossed. 
And the trail of the hunted again is lost. 
227 



228 THE MAN HUNT 

An upturned pebble ; a bit of ground 
A heel has trampled — the trail is found. 

And the woods reecho the bloodhounds' bay 
As again they take to the mountain way. 

A rock ; a ribbon of road ; a ledge, 

With a pine tree clutching its crumbling edge. 

A pine, that the lightning long since clave, 
Whose huge roots hollow a ragged cave. 

A shout ; a curse ; and a face aghast ; 
The human quarry is laired at last. 

The human quarry with clay-clogged hair 
And eyes of terror who waits them there. 

That glares and crouches and rising then 
Hurls clods and curses at dogs and men. 

Until the blow of a gun-butt lays 

Him stunned and bleeding upon his face. 

A rope ; a prayer ; and an oak-tree near. 
And a score of hands to swing him clear. 

A grim, black thing for the setting sun 
And the moon and the stars to gaze upon. 



MY ROMANCE 

If it so befalls that the midnight hovers 

In mist no moonlight breaks, 
The leagues of the years my spirit covers, 

And my self myself forsakes. 

And I live in a land of stars and flowers, 

White cliffs by a silvery sea ; 
And the pearly points of her opal towers 

From the mountains beckon me. 

And I think that I know that I hear her calling 
From a casement bathed with Hght — 

Through music of waters in waters falling 
Mid palms from a mountain height. 

And I feel that I think my love's awaited 

By the romance of her charms ; 
That her feet are early and mine belated 

In a world that chains my arms. 

But I break my chains and the rest is easy — 

In the shadow of the rose, 
Snow-white, that blooms in her garden breezy, 

We meet and no one knows. 
229 



230 MY ROMANCE 

And we dream sweet dreams and kiss sweet kisses ; 

The world — it may live or die ! 
The world that forgets ; that never misses 

The life that has long gone by. 

We speak old vows that have long been spoken ; 

And weep a long-gone woe : 
For you must know our hearts were broken 

Hundreds of years ago. 



A MAID WHO DIED OLD 

Frail, shrunken face, so pinched and worn, 
That Ufe has carved with care and doubt ! 

So weary waiting, night and morn, 
For that which never came about ! 

Pale lamp, so utterly forlorn. 

In which God's light at last is out. 

Gray hair, that lies so thin and prim 
On either side the sunken brows ! 

And soldered eyes, so deep and dim, 
No word of man could now arouse ! 

And hollow hands, so virgin slim, 
Forever clasped in silent vows ! 

Poor breasts ! that God designed for love, 
For baby lips to kiss and press ; 

That never felt, yet dreamed thereof. 
The human touch, the child caress — 

That lie like shriveled blooms above 
The heart's long-perished happiness. 
231 



232 A MAID WHO DIED OLD 

O withered body, Nature gave 
For purposes of death and birth, 

That never knew, and could but crave 
Those things perhaps that make life worth — 

Rest now, alas ! within the grave, 
Sad shell that served no end of Earth. 



BALLAD OF LOW-LIE-DOWN 

JoHN-A-DREAMS and Harum-Scarum 

Came a-riding into town : 
At the Sign o' the Jug-and- Jorum 

There they met with Low-He-down. 

Brave in shoes of Romany leather, 
Bodice blue and gypsy gown, 

And a cap of fur and feather, 
In the inn sat Low-lie-down. 

Harum-Scarum kissed her lightly ; 

Smiled into her eyes of brown : 
Clasped her waist and held her tightly, 

Laughing, "Love me. Low-lie-down !" 

Then with many an oath and swagger, 

As a man of great renown. 
On the board he clapped his dagger, 

Called for sack and sat him down. 

So a while they laughed together ; 

Then he rose and with a frown 
Sighed, ''While still 'tis pleasant weather, 

I must leave thee, Low-lie-down." 
233 



234 BALLAD OF LOW-LIE-DOWN 

So away rode Harum-Scarum ; 

With a song rode out of town ; 
At the Sign o' the Jug-and- Jorum 

Weeping tarried Low-Ue-down. 

Then this John-a-dreams, in tatters, 

In his pocket ne'er a crown, 
Touched her, saying, ''Wench, what matters ! 

Dry your eyes and, come, sit down. 

"Here's my hand : we'll roam together. 

Far away from thorp and town. 
Here's my heart, — for any weather, — 

And my dreams, too, Low-he-down. 

"Some men call me dreamer, poet : 
Some men call me fool and clown — 

What I am but you shall know it, 
Only you, sweet Low-lie-down." 

For a little while she pondered : 

Smiled : then said, "Let care go drown ! " 

Up and kissed him. . . . Forth they wandered, 
John-a-dreams and Low-He-down. 



ROMANCE 

Thus have I pictured her : — In Arden old 
A white-browed maiden with a falcon eye, 

Rose-flushed of face, with locks of wind-blown gold, 
Teaching her hawks to fly. 

Or, 'mid her boar-hounds, panting with the heat. 
In huntsman green, sounding the hunt's wild prize, 

Plumed, dagger-belted, while beneath her feet 
The spear-pierced monster dies. 

Or in Breceliand, on some high tower, 
Clad white in samite, last of her lost race, 

My soul beholds her, lovelier than a flower, 
Gazing with pensive face. 

Or, robed in raiment of romantic lore, 

Like Oriana, dark of eye and hair, 
Riding through realms of legend evermore, 

And ever young and fair. 

Or now like Bradamant, as brave as just. 

In complete steel, her pure face lit with scorn, 

At giant castles, dens of demon lust, 
Winding her bugle-horn. 
235 



236 ROMANCE 

Another Una ; and in chastity 

A second Britomart ; in beauty far 
O'er her who led King Charles's chivalry 

And Paynim lands to war. . . . 

Now she, from Avalon's deep-dingled bowers, — 
'Mid which white stars and never-waning moons 

Make marriage; and dim lips of musk-mouthed 
flowers 
Sigh faint and fragrant tunes, — 

Implores me follow ; and, in shadowy shapes 
Of sunset, shows me, — mile on misty mile 

Of purple precipice, — all the haunted capes 
Of her enchanted isle. 

Where, bowered in bosks and overgrown with vine, 
Upon a headland breasting violet seas, 

Her castle towers, like a dream divine, 
With stairs and galleries. 

And at her casement, Circe-beautiful, 
Above the surgeless reaches of the deep. 

She sits, while, in her gardens, fountains lull 
The perfumed wind asleep. 

Or, round her brow a diadem of spars. 

She leans and hearkens, from her raven height. 



ROMANCE 237 

The nightingales that, choiring to the stars, 
Take with wild song the night. 

Or, where the moon is mirrored in the waves, 
To mark, deep down, the Sea King's city rolled, 

Wrought of huge shells and labyrinthine caves, 
Ribbed pale with pearl and gold. 

There doth she wait forever ; and the kings 
Of all the world have wooed her : but she cares 

For none but him, the Love, that dreams and sings, 
That sings and dreams and dares. 



AMADIS AND ORIANA 

From " Beltenebros at Miraflores " 

O SUNSET, from the springs of stars, 

Draw down thy cataracts of gold ; 
And belt their streams with burning bars 

Of ruby on w^hich flame is rolled : 
Drench dingles with laburnum light ; 

Drown every vale in violet blaze : 
Rain rose-light down ; and, poppy-bright, 

Die downward o'er the hills of haze, 
And bring at last the stars of night ! 



The stars and moon ! that silver world. 

Which, like a spirit, faces west. 
Her foam-white feet with light empearled, 

Bearing white flame within her breast : 
Earth's sister sphere of lire and snow. 

Who shows to Earth her heart's pale heat, 
And bids her mark its pulses glow. 

And hear their crystal currents beat 
With beauty, lighting all below. 
238 



AMADIS AND ORIANA 239 

O cricket, with thy elfin pipe, 

That tinkles in the grass and grain ; 
And dove-pale buds, that, dropping, stripe 

The glen's blue night, and smell of rain ; 
O nightingale, that so dost wail 

On yonder blossoming branch of snow, 
Thrill, fill the wild deer-haunted dale. 

Where Oriana, walking slow. 
Comes, thro' the moonlight, dreamy pale. 

She comes to meet me ! — Earth and air 

Grow radiant with another light. 
In her dark eyes and her dark hair 

Are all the stars and all the night : 
She comes ! I clasp her ! — and it is 

As if no grief had ever been. — 
In all the world for us who kiss 

There are no other women or men 
But Oriana and Amadis. 



THE ROSICRUCIAN 



The tripod flared with a purple spark, 
And the mist hung emerald in the dark : 
Now he stooped to the lilac flame 

Over the glare of the amber embers, 
Thrice to utter no earthly name ; 

Thrice, like a mind that half remembers; 
Bathing his face in the magic mist 
Where the brilliance burned like an amethyst. 

II 

" Sylph, whose soul was born of mine. 
Born of the love that made me thine, 
Once more flash on my eyes ! Again 

Be the loved caresses taken ! 
Lip to lip let our forms remain ! — 

Here in the circle sense, awaken ! 
Ere spirit meet spirit, the flesh laid by, 
Let me touch thee, and let me die." 
240 



THE ROSICRUCIAN 241 



III 



Sunset heavens may burn, but never 

Know such splendor ! There bloomed an ever 

Opaline orb, where the sylphid rose 

A shape of luminous white ; diviner 
White than the essence of light that sows 

The moons and suns through space ; and finer 
Than radiance born of a shooting-star, 
Or the wild Aurora that streams afar. 

IV 

"Look on the face of the soul to whom 
Thou givest thy soul like added perfume ! 
Thou, who heard'st me, who long had prayed, 

Waiting alone at morning's portal ! — 
Thus on thy Hps let my Hps be laid, 

Love, who hast made me all immortal ! 
Give me thine arms now ! Come and rest 
Weariness out on my beaming breast !" 



Was it her soul ? or the sapphire fire 
That sang like the note of a seraph's lyre ? 
Out of her mouth there fell no word — 

She spake with her soul, as a flower speaketh 



242 THE ROSICRUCIAN 

Fragrant messages none hath heard, 

Which the sense divines when the spirit seeketh. . 
And he seemed alone in a place so dim 
That the spirit's face, who was gazing at him. 
For its burning eyes he could not see : 
Then he knew he had died ; that she and he 
Were one ; and he saw that this was she. 



THE AGE OF GOLD 

The clouds that tower in storm, that beat 

Arterial thunder in their veins ; 
The wildflowers lifting, shyly sweet, 

Their perfect faces from the plains, — 
All high, all lowly things of Earth 
For no vague end have had their birth. 

Low strips of mist that mesh the moon 

Above the foaming waterfall ; 
And mountains, that God's hand hath hewn, 

And forests, where the great winds call, — 
Within the grasp of such as see 
Are parts of a conspiracy ; 

To seize the soul with beauty ; hold 
The heart with love : and thus fulfill 

Within ourselves the Age of Gold, 
That never died, and never will, — 

As long as one true nature feels 

The wonders that the world reveals. 



243 



BEAUTY AND ART 

The gods are dead ; but still for me 

Lives on in wildwood brook and tree 
Each myth, each old divinity. 

For me still laughs among the rocks 

The Naiad ; and the Dryad's locks 
Drop perfume on the wildflower flocks. 

The Satyr's hoof still prints the loam ; 

And, whiter than the wind-blown foam. 
The Oread haunts her mountain home. 

To him, whose mind is fain to dwell 
With loveliness no time can quell, 
All things are real, imperishable. 

To him — whatever facts may say — 
Who sees the soul beneath the clay. 
Is proof of a diviner day. 

The very stars and flowers preach 
A gospel old as God, and teach 
Philosophy a child may reach ; 
244 



BEAUTY AND ART 245 

That cannot die ; that shall not cease ; 

That lives through idealities 
Of Beauty, ev'n as Rome and Greece. 

That Ufts the soul above the clod, 

And, working out some period 
Of art, is part and proof of God. 



THE SEA SPIRIT 

Ah me ! I shall not waken soon 
From dreams of such divinity ! 
A spirit singing 'neath the moon 
Tome. 

Wild sea-spray driven of the storm 
Is not so wildly white as she, 
Who beckoned with a foam-white arm 
To me. 

With eyes dark green, and golden-green 
Long locks that rippled drippingly, 
Out of the green wave she did lean 
Tome. 

And sang ; till Earth and Heaven seemed 
A far, forgotten memory, 
And more than Heaven in her who gleamed 
On me. 

Sleep, sweeter than love's face or home ; 
And death's immutabihty ; 
And music of the plangent foam, 
For me ! 

246 



THE SEA SPIRIT 247 

Sweep over her ! with all thy ships, 
With all thy stormy tides, O sea ! — 
The memory of immortal lips 
For me ! 



GARGAPHIE 

^'SuccinctcB sacra Diance.^' — Ovid 



There the ragged sunlight lay 
Tawny on thick ferns and gray 

On dark waters : dimmer, 
Lone and deep, the cypress grove 
Bowered mystery and wove 
Braided lights, like those that love 
On the pearl plumes of a dove 

Faint to gleam and glimmer. 

II 

There centennial pine and oak 
Into stormy cadence broke : 

Hollow rocks gloomed, slanting, 
Echoing in dim arcade. 
Looming with long moss, that made 
Twilight streaks in tatters laid : 
Where the wild hart, hunt-affrayed. 

Plunged the water, panting. 
248 



GARGAPHIE 249 



III 



Poppies of a sleepy gold 

Mooned the gray-green darkness rolled 

Down its vistas, making 
Wisp-like blurs of flame. And pale 
Stole the dim deer down the vale : 
And the haunting nightingale 
Throbbed unseen — the olden tale 

All its wild heart breaking. 

IV 

There the hazy serpolet, 
Dewy cistus, blooming wet, 

Blushed on bank and bowlder ; 
There the cyclamen, as wan 
As first footsteps of the dawn, 
Carpeted the spotted lawn : 
Where the nude nymph, dripping drawn, 

Basked a wildflower shoulder. 



V 



In the citrine shadows there 
What tall presences and fair, 

Godlike, stood ! — or, gracious 
As the rock-rose there that grew. 



2SO GARGAPHIE 

Delicate and dim as dew, 
Stepped from boles of oaks, and drew 
Faunlike forms to follow, who 
Filled the forest spacious ! — 



VI 

Guarding that Boeotian 
Valley so no foot of man 

Soiled its silence holy 
With profaning tread — save one, 
The Hyantian : Actaeon, 
Who beheld, and might not shun 
Pale Diana's wrath ; undone 

By his own mad folly. 

VII 

Lost it lies — that valley : sleeps 
In serene enchantment ; keeps 

Beautiful its banished 
Bowers that no man may see ; 
Fountains that her deity 
Haunts, and every rock and tree 
Where her hunt goes swinging free 

As in ages vanished. 



THE DEAD OREAD 

Her heart is still and leaps no more 
With holy passion when the breeze, 

Her whilom playmate, as before, 

Comes with the language of the bees, 

Sad songs her mountain cedars sing, 

And water-music murmuring. 



Her calm white feet, — erst fleet and fast 
As Daphne's when a god pursued, — 

No more will dance Hke sunlight past 
The gold-green vistas of the wood. 

Where every quailing floweret 

Smiled into life where they were set. 



Hers were the limbs of living light, 

And breasts of snow ; as virginal 
As mountain drifts ; and throat as white 

As foam of mountain waterfall ; 
And hyacinthine curls, that streamed 
Like crag-born mists, and gloomed and gleamed. 
251 



252 THE DEAD OREAD 

Her presence breathed such scents as haunt 
Moist, mountain dells and solitudes ; 

Aromas wild as some wild plant 

That fills with sweetness all the woods : 

And comradeships of stars and skies 

Shone in the azure of her eyes. 

Her grave be by a mossy rock 
Upon the top of some wild hill, 

Removed, remote from men who mock 
The myths and dreams of life they kill : 

Where all of beauty, naught of lust 

May guard her soUtary dust. 



THE FAUN 

The joys that touched thee once, be mine ! 

The sympathies of sky and sea, 
The friendships of each rock and pine, 

That made thy lonely life, ah me ! 

In Tempe or in Gargaphie. 

Such joy as thou didst feel when first, 
On some wild crag, thou stood'st alone 

To watch the mountain tempest burst. 
With streaming thunder, lightning-sown, 
On Latmos or on Pehon. 

Thy awe ! when, crowned with vastness, Night 
And Silence ruled the deep's abyss ; 

And through dark leaves thou saw'st the white 
Breasts of the starry maids who kiss 
Pale feet of moony Artemis. 

Thy dreams ! when, breasting matted weeds 

Of Arethusa, thou didst hear 
The music of the wind-swept reeds ; 

And down dim forest- ways drew near 

Shy herds of sHm Arcadian deer. 
253 



254 THE FAUN 

Thy wisdom ! that knew naught but love 
And beauty, with which love is fraught ; 

The wisdom of the heart — whereof 

All noblest passions spring — that thought 
As Nature thinks, "All else is naught." 

Thy hope ! wherein To-morrow set 
No shadow ; hope, that, lacking care 

And retrospect, held no regret. 

But bloomed in rainbows everywhere, 
Filling with gladness all the air. 

These were thine all : in all life's moods 
Embracing all of happiness : 

And when within thy long-loved woods 
Didst lay thee down to die — no less 
Thy happiness stood by to bless. 



THE PAPHIAN VENUS 

With anxious eyes and dry, expectant lips, 
Within the sculptured stoa by the sea, 

All day she waited while, like ghostly ships, 
Long clouds rolled over Paphos : the wild bee 

Hung in the sultry poppy, half asleep. 

Beside the shepherd and his drowsy sheep. 

White-robed she waited day by day ; alone 
With the white temple's shrined concupiscence, 

The Paphian goddess on her obscene throne. 
Binding all chastity to violence, 

All innocence to lust that feels no shame — 

Venus Mylitta born of filth and flame. 

So must they haunt her marble portico, 
The devotees of Paphos, passion-pale 

As moonlight streaming through the stormy snow ; 
Dark eyes desirous of the stranger sail, 

The gods shall bring across the Cyprian Sea, 

With him elected to their mastery. 

A priestess of the temple came, when eve 
Blazed, like a satrap's triumph, in the west ; 

255 



256 THE PAPHIAN VENUS 

And watched her listening to the ocean's heave, 

Dusk's golden glory on her face and breast, 
And in her hair the rosy wind's caress, — 
Pitying her dedicated tenderness. 

When out of darkness night persuades the stars, 
A dream shall bend above her saying, " Soon 

A barque shall come with purple sails and spars. 
Sailing from Tarsus 'neath a low white moon ; 

And thou shalt see one in a robe of Tyre 

Facing toward thee like the god Desire. 

"Rise then ! as, clad in starlight, riseth Night — 
Thy nakedness clad on with loveliness ! 

So shalt thou see him, like the god Delight, 
Breast through the foam and climb the cUff to press 

Hot lips to thine and lead thee in before 

Love's awful presence where ye shall adore." 

Thus at her heart the vision entered in, 

With lips of lust the lips of song had kissed, 

And eyes of passion laughing with sweet sin, 
A shimmering splendor robed in amethyst, — 

Seen like that star set in the glittering gloam, — 

Venus Myhtta born of fire and foam. 

So shall she dream until, near middle night, — 
When on the blackness of the ocean's rim 



THE PAPHIAN VENUS 257 

The moon, like some war-galleon all alight 

With blazing battle, from the sea shall swim, — 
A shadow, with inviolate lips and eyes. 
Shall rise before her speaking in this wise : 

" So hast thou heard the promises of one, — 
Of her, with whom the God of gods is wroth, — 

For whom was prophesied at Babylon 

The second death — Chaldaean Mylidoth ! 

Whose feet take hold on darkness and despair, 

Hissing destruction in her heart and hair. 

" Wouldst thou behold the vessel she would bring ? — 
A wreck ! ten hundred years have smeared with 
slime : 

A hulk ! where all abominations cling, 

The spawn and vermin of the seas of time : 

Wild waves have rotted it ; fierce suns have scorched ; 

Mad winds have tossed and stormy stars have torched. 

"Can lust give birth to love ? The vile and foul 
Be mother to beauty ? Lo ! can this thing be ? — 

A monster like a man shall rise and howl 
Upon the wreck across the crawling sea. 

Then plunge ; and swim unto thee ; like an ape, 

A beast all belly. — Thou canst not escape !" 

Gone was the shadow with the suffering brow ; 
And in the temple's porch she lay and wept, 



258 THE PAPHIAN VENUS 

Alone with night, the ocean, and her vow. — 

Then up the east the moon's full splendor swept, 
And dark between it — wreck or argosy ? — 
A sudden vessel far away at sea. 



ORIENTAL ROMANCE 



Beyond lost seas of summer she 
Dwelt on an island of the sea, 
Last scion of that dynasty, 
Queen of a race forgotten long. — 
With eyes of hght and lips of song. 
From seaward groves of blowing lemon, 
She called me in her native tongue, 
Low-leaned on some rich robe of Yemen. 



II 

I was a king. Three moons we drove 
Across green gulfs, the crimson clove 
And cassia spiced, to claim her love. 
Packed was my barque with gums and gold ; 
Rich fabrics ; sandalwood, grown old 
With odor ; gems ; and pearls of Oman, — 
Than her white breasts less white and cold ; - 
And myrrh, less fragrant than this woman. 
259 



26o ORIENTAL ROMANCE 

III 

From Bassora I came. We saw 

Her eagle castle on a claw 

Of soaring precipice, o'erawe 

The surge and thunder of the spray. 

Like some great opal, far away 

It shone, with battlement and spire, 

Wherefrom, with wild aroma, day 

Blew splintered lights of sapphirine fire. 

IV 

Lamenting caverns dark, that keep 

Sonorous echoes of the deep, 

Led upward to her castle steep. . . . 

Fair as the moon, whose light is shed 

In Ramadan, was she, who led 

My love unto her island bowers. 

To find her . . . lying young and dead 

Among her maidens and her flowers. 



THE MAMELUKE 



She was a queen. 'Midst mutes and slaves, 
A mameluke, he loved her. — Waves 
Dashed not more hopelessly the paves 

Of her high marble palace-stair 

Than lashed his love his heart's despair. — 
As souls in Hell dream Paradise, 

He suffered yet forgot it there 
Beneath Rommaneh's houri eyes. 

n 

With passion eating at his heart 

He served her beauty, but dared dart 

No amorous glance, nor word impart. — 

Taifi leather's perfumed tan 

Beneath her, on a low divan 
She lay 'mid cushions stuffed with down : 

A slave-girl with an ostrich fan 
Sat by her in a golden gown. 



261 



262 THE MAMELUKE 

III 

She bade him sing. Fair lutanist, 

She loved Jiis voice. With one white wrist, 

Hooped with a blaze of amethyst, 
She raised her ru1)y-crusted lute : 
Gold-welted stuff, like some rich fruit. 

Her raiment, diamond-showered, rolled 
Folds pigeon-purple, whence one foot 

Drooped in an anklet-twist of gold. 

IV 

He stood and sang with all the fire 
That boiled within his blood's desire, 
That made him all her slave yet higher : 
And at the end his passion durst 
Quench with one burning kiss its thirst. — 
O eunuchs, did her face show scorn 

When through his heart your daggers burst ? 
And dare ye say he died forlorn ? 



THE SLAVE 

He waited till within her tower 
Her taper signalled him the hour. 

He was a prince both fair and brave. — 
What hope that he would love her slave ! 

He of the Persian dynasty ; 
And she a Queen of Araby ! — 

No Peri singing to a star 
Upon the sea were loveHer. . . . 

I helped her drop the silken rope. 
He clomb, aflame with love and hope. 

I drew the dagger from my gown 
And cut the ladder, leaning down. 

Oh, wild his face, and wild the fall : 
Her cry was wilder than them all. 

I heard her cry ; I heard him moan ; 
And stood as merciless as stone. 
263 



264 THE SLAVE 

The eunuchs came : fierce scimitars 
Stirred in the torch-lit corridors. 

She spoke like one who speaks in sleep, 
And bade me strike or she would leap. 

I bade her leap : the time was short : 
And kept the dagger for my heart. 

She leapt. ... I put their blades aside, 
And smiling in their faces — died. 



THE PORTRAIT 

In some quaint Nurnberg maler-atelier 
Uprummaged. When and where was never clear 
Nor yet how he obtained it. When, by whom 
Twas painted — who shall say ? itself a gloom 
Resisting inquisition. I opine 
It is a Durer. Mark that touch, this line ; 
Are they deniable ? — Distinguished grace 
Of the pure oval of the noble face 
Tarnished in color badly. Half in light 
Extend it so. Incline. The exquisite 
Expression leaps abruptly : piercing scorn ; 
Imperial beauty ; each, an icy thorn 
Of light, disdainful eyes and . . . well ! no use ! 
Effaced and but beheld ! a sad abuse 
Of patience. — Often, vaguely visible, 
The portrait fills each feature, making swell 
The heart wdth hope : avoiding face and hair 
Start out in living hues ; astonished, "There ! — 
The picture lives !" your soul exults, when, lo ! 
You hold a blur ; an undetermined glow 
Dislimns a daub. — "Restore ?" — Ah, I have tried 
Our best restorers, and it has defied. 
26s 



266 THE PORTRAIT 

Storied, mysterious, say, perhaps a ghost 
Lives in the canvas ; hers, some artist lost ; 
A duchess', haply. Her he worshiped ; dared 
Not tell he worshiped. From his window stared 
Of Nuremberg one sunny morn when she 
Passed paged to court. Her cold nobility 
Loved, lived for like a purpose. Seized and pHed 
A feverish brush — her face ! — Despaired and died. 

The narrow Judengasse : gables frown 

Around a humpbacked usurer's, where brown, 

Neglected in a corner, long it lay. 

Heaped in a pile of riff-raff, such as — say, 

Retables done in tempora and old 

Panels by Wohlgemuth ; stiff paintings cold 

Of martyrs and apostles, — names forgot, — 

Holbeins and Diirers, say ; a haloed lot 

Of praying saints, madonnas : these, perchance, 

'Mid wine-stained purples, mothed ; an old romance ; 

A crucifix and rosary ; inlaid 

Arms, Saracen-elaborate ; a strayed 

Niello of Byzantium ; rich work, 

In bronze, of Florence : here a murderous dirk, 

There holy patens. 

So. — My ancestor. 
The first De Herancour, esteemed by far 
This piece most precious, most desirable ; 



THE PORTRAIT 267 

Purchased and brought to Paris. It looked well 
In the dark paneling above the old 
Hearth of the room. The head's rehgious gold, 
The soft severity of the nun face, 
Made of the room an apostohc place 
Revered and feared. — 

Like some lived scene I see 
That Gothic room : its Flemish tapestry ; 
Embossed within the marble hearth a shield, 
Carved 'round with thistles ; in its argent field 
Three sable mallets — arms of Herancour — 
Topped with the crest, a helm and hands that bore, 
Outstretched, two mallets. On a lectern laid, — 
Between two casements, lozenge-paned, embayed, — 
A vellum volume of black-lettered text. 
Near by a taper, winking as if vexed 
With silken gusts a nervous curtain sends, 
Behind wliich, haply, daggered Murder bends. 

And then I seem to see again the hall ; 
The stairway leading to that room. — Then all 
The terror of that night of blood and crime 
Passes before me. — 

It is Catherine's time : 
The house De Herancour's. On floors, splashed red, 
Torchlight of Medicean wrath is shed. 
Down carven corridors and rooms, — where couch 



268 THE PORTRAIT 

And chairs lie shattered and black shadows crouch 
Torch-pierced with fear, — a sound of swords draws 

near — 
The stir of searching steel. 

What find they here, 
Torch-bearer, swordsman, and fierce halberdier, 
On St. Bartholomew's ? — A Huguenot ! 
Dead in his chair ! Eyes, violently shot 
With horror, glaring at the portrait there : 
Coihng his neck a blood Hne, like a hair 
Of finest fire. The portrait, like a fiend, — 
Looking exalted visitation, — leaned 
From its black panel ; in its eyes a hate 
Satanic ; hair — a glowing auburn ; late 
A dull, enduring golden. 

"just one thread 
Of the fierce hair around his throat," they said, 
"Twisting a burning ray ; he — staring dead." 



THE BLACK KNIGHT 

I HAD not found the road too short, 

As once I had in days of youth, 

In that old forest of long ruth, 

Where my young knighthood broke its heart, 

Ere love and it had come to part. 

And lies made mockery of truth. 

I had not found the road too short. 



A blind man, by the nightmare way, 
Had set me right when I was wrong. — 
I had been blind my whole life long — 
What wonder then that on this day 
The blind should show me how astray 
My strength had gone, my heart once strong. 
A blind man pointed me the way. 

The road had been a heartbreak one. 
Of roots and rocks and tortured trees, 
And pools, above my horse's knees, 
And wandering paths, where spiders spun 
'Twixt boughs that never saw the sun, 
269 



270 THE BLACK KNIGHT 

And silence of lost centuries. 

The road had been a heartbreak one. 



It seemed long years since that black hour 

When she had fled, and I took horse 

To follow, and without remorse 

To slay her and her paramour 

In that old keep, that ruined tower, 

From whence was borne her father's corse. 

It seemed long years since that black hour. 

And now my horse was starved and spent, 
My gallant destrier, old and spare ; 
The vile road's mire in mane and hair, 
I felt him totter as he went : — 
Such hungry woods were never meant 
For pasture : hate had reaped them bare. 
Aye, my poor beast was old and spent. 

I too had naught to stay me with ; 

And like my horse was starved and lean ; 

My armor gone ; my raiment mean ; 

Bare-haired I rode ; uneasy sith 

The way I'd lost, and some dark myth 

Far in the woods had laughed obscene. 

I had had naught to stay me with. 



THE BLACK KNIGHT 271 

Then I dismounted. Better so. 

And found that bhnd man at my rein. 

And there the path stretched straight and plain. 

I saw at once the way to go. 

The forest road I used to know 

In days when life had less of pain. 

Then I dismounted. Better so. 



I had but little time to spare, 
Since evening now was drawing near ; 
And then I thought I saw a sneer 
Enter into that blind man's stare : 
And suddenly a thought leapt bare, — 
What if the Fiend had set him here ! - 
I still might smite him or might spare. 



I braced my sword : then turned to look : 
For I had heard an evil laugh : 
The blind man, leaning on his staff, 
Still stood there where my leave I took : 
What ! did he mock me ? Would I brook 
A blind fool's scorn ? — My sword was half 
Out of its sheath. I turned to look : 

And he was gone. And to my side 
My horse came nickering as afraid. 
Did he too fear to be betrayed ? — 
What use for him ? I might not ride. 



272 THE BLACK KNIGHT 

So to a great bough there I tied, 
And left him in the forest glade : 
My spear and shield I left beside. 

My sword was all I needed there. 
It would suffice to right my wrongs ; 
To cut the knot of all those thongs 
With which she'd bound me to despair, 
That woman with her midnight hair, 
Her Circe snares and Siren songs. 
My sword was all I needed there. 

And then that laugh again I heard, 
Evil as Hell and darkness are. 
It shook my heart behind its bar 
Of purpose, like some ghastly word. 
But then it may have been a bird, 
An owlet in the forest far, 
A raven, croaking, that I heard. 

I loosed my sword within its sheath ; 
My sword, disuse and dews of night 
Had fouled with rust and iron-blight. 
I seemed to hear the forest breathe 
A menace at me through its teeth 
Of thorns 'mid which the way lay white. 
I loosed my sword within its sheath. 



THE BLACK KNIGHT 273 

I had not noticed until now 
The sun was gone, and gray the moon 
Hung staring ; pale as marble hewn ; — 
Like some old malice, bleak of brow, 
It glared at me through leaf and bough, 
With which the tattered way was strewn. 
I had not noticed until now. 

And then, all unexpected, vast 

Above the tops of ragged pines 

I saw a ruin, dark with vines. 

Against the blood-red sunset massed : 

My perilous tower of the past. 

Round which the woods thrust giant spines. 

I never knew it was so vast. 

Long while I stood considering. — 
This was the place and this the night. 
The blind man then had set me right. 
Here she had come for sheltering. 
That ruin held her : that dark wing 
Which flashed a momentary light. 
Some time I stood considering. 

Deep darkness fell. The somber glare 

Of sunset, that made cavernous eyes 

Of those gaunt casements 'gainst the skies, 



274 THE BLACK KNIGHT 

Had burnt to ashes everywhere. 

Before my feet there rose a stair 

Of oozy stone, of giant size, 

On which the gray moon flung its glare. 

Then I went forward, sword in hand, 
Until the slimy causeway loomed, 
And huge beyond it yawned and gloomed 
The gateway where one seemed to stand, 
In armor, like a burning brand. 
Sword-drawn ; his visor barred and plumed. 
And I went toward him, sword in hand. 

He should not stay revenge from me. 

Whatever lord or knight he were, 

He should not keep me long from her. 

That woman dyed in infamy. 

No matter. God or devil he, 

His sword should prove no barrier. — 

Fool ! who would keep revenge from me ! 

And then I heard, harsh over all, 
That demon laughter, filled with scorn : 
It woke the echoes, wild, forlorn, 
Dark in the ivy of that wall. 
As when, within a mighty hall. 
One blows a giant battle-horn. 
Loud, loud that laugh rang over all. 



THE BLACK KNIGHT 

And then I struck him where he towered : 
I struck him, struck with all my hate : 
Black-plumed he loomed before the gate : 
I struck, and found his sword that showered 
Fierce flame on mine while black he glowered 
Behind his visor's wolfish grate. 
I struck ; and taller still he towered. 

A year meseemed we battled there : 

A year ; ten years ; a century : 

My blade was snapped ; his lay in three : 

His mail was hewn ; and everywhere 

Was blood ; it streaked my face and hair ; 

And still he towered over me. 

A year meseemed we battled there. 

" Unmask ! " I cried. " Yea, doff thy casque ! 

Put up thy visor ! fight me fair ! 

I have no mail ; my head is bare ! 

Take off thy helm, is all I ask ! 

Why dost thou hide thy face ? — Unmask ! " — 

My eyes were blind with blood and hair, 

And still I cried, " Take off thy casque ! " 

And then once more that laugh rang out 
Like madness in the caves of Hell : 
It hooted like some monster well. 
The haunt of owls, or some mad rout 



75 



276 THE BLACK KNIGHT 

Of witches. And with battle shout 
Once more upon that knight I fell, 
While wild again that laugh rang out. 

Like Death's own eyes his glared in mine, 
As with the fragment of my blade 
I smote him helmwise ; huge he swayed, 
Then crashed, like some cadaverous pine, 
Uncasqued, his face in full moonshine : 
And I — I saw ; and shrank afraid. 
For, lo ! behold ! the face was mine. 

What devil's work was here ! — What jest 
For fiends to laugh at, demons hiss ! — 
To slay myself ? and so to miss 
My hate's reward ? — revenge confessed ! — 
Was this knight I ? — My brain I pressed. — 
Then who was he who gazed on this ? — 
What devil's work was here ! — What jest ! 

It was myself on whom I gazed — 
My darker self ! — With fear I rose. — 
I was right weak from those great blows. — 
I stood bewildered, stunned and dazed. 
And looked around with eyes amazed. — 
I could not slay her now, God knows ! — 
Around me there a while I gazed. 



THE BLACK KNIGHT 277 

Then turned and fled into the night, 
While overhead once more I heard 
That laughter, Hke some demon bird 
Wailing in darkness. — Then a light 
Made clear a woman by that knight. 
I saw 'twas she, but said no word, 
And silent fled into the night. 



IN ARCADY 

I REMEMBER, when a child, 
How within the April wild 
Once I walked with Mystery 
In the groves of Arcady. . . . 
Through the boughs, before, behind, 
Swept the mantle of the wind, 
Thunderous and unconfined. 

Overhead the curving moon 
Pierced the twilight : a cocoon. 
Golden, big with unborn wings — 
Beauty, shaping spiritual things. 
Vague, impatient of the night, 
Eager for its heavenward flight 
Out of darkness into light. 

Here and there the oaks assumed 
Satyr aspects ; shadows gloomed. 
Hiding, of a dryad look ; 
And the naiad-frantic brook, 
Crying, fled the soUtude, 
Filled with terror of the wood. 
Or some faun-thing that pursued. 
278 



IN ARCADY 279 

In the dead leaves on the ground 
Crept a movement ; rose a sound : 
Everywhere the silence ticked 
As with hands of things that picked 
At the loam, or in the dew, — 
Elvish sounds that crept or flew, — 
Beak-like, pushing surely through. 

Down the forest, overhead. 
Stammering a dead leaf fled. 
Filled with elemental fear 
Of some dark destruction near — 
One, whose glowworm eyes I saw 
Hag with flame the crooked haw, 
Which the moon clutched like a claw. 

Gradually beneath the tree 
Grew a shape ; a nudity : 
Lithe and slender ; silent as 
Growth of tree or blade of grass ; 
Brown and silken as the bloom 
Of the trillium in the gloom, 
Visible as strange perfume. 

For an instant there it stood, 
Smiling on me in the wood : 
And I saw its hair was green 
As the leaf-sheath, gold of sheen : 



28o IN ARCADY 

And its eyes an azure wet, 
From within which seemed to jet 
Sapphire Hghts and violet. 

Swiftly by I saw it glide ; 
And the dark was deified: 
Wild before it everywhere 
Gleamed the greenness of its hair ; 
And around it danced a light, 
Soft, the sapphire of its sight, 
Making witchcraft of the night. 

On the branch above, the bird 
Trilled to it a dreamy word : 
In its bud the wild bee droned 
Honeyed greeting, drowsy-toned : 
And the brook forgot the gloom. 
Hushed its heart, and, wrapped in bloom, 
Breathed a welcome of perfume. 

To its beauty bush and tree 

Stretched sweet arms of ecstasy ; 

And the soul within the rock 

Lichen-treasures did unlock 

As upon it fell its eye ; 

And the earth, that felt it nigh, 

Into wildflowers seemed to sigh. . . . 



IN ARCADY 281 

Was it dryad ? was it faun ? 

Wandered from the times long gone. 

Was it sylvan ? was it fay ? — 

Dim survivor of the day 

When Religion peopled streams, 

Woods and rocks with shapes like gleams, — 

That invaded then my dreams ? 

Was it shadow ? was it shape ? 
Or but fancy's wild escape ? — 
Of my own child's world the charm 
That assumed material form ? — 
Of my soul the mystery, 
That the spring revealed to me, 
There in long-lost Arcady ? 



PROTOTYPES 

Whether it be that we in letters trace 
The pure exactness of a wood bird's strain, 
And name it song ; or with the brush attain 
The high perfection of a wildfiower's face ; 
Or mold in difficult marble all the grace 
We know as man ; or from the wind and rain 
Catch elemental rapture of refrain 
And mark in music to due time and place : 
The aim of Art is Nature ; to unfold 
Her truth and beauty to the souls of men 
In close suggestions ; in whose forms is cast 
Nothing so new but 'tis long eons old ; 
Nothing so old but 'tis as young as when 
The mind conceived it in the ages past. 



. 282 



MARCH 

This is the tomboy month of all the year, 

March, who comes shouting o'er the winter hills, 

Waking the world with laughter, as she wills, 

Or wild halloos, a windflower in her ear. 

She stops a moment by the half-thawed mere 

And whistles to the wind, and straightway shrills 

The hyla's song, and hoods of daffodils 

Crowd golden round her, leaning their heads to hear. 

Then through the woods, that drip with all their eaves, 

Her mad hair blown about her, loud she goes 

Singing and calHng to the naked trees ; 

And straight the oilets of the little leaves 

Open their eyes in wonder, rows on rows. 

And the first bluebird bugles to the breeze. 



283 



DUSK 

Corn-colored clouds upon a sky of gold, 

And 'mid their sheaves, — where, like a daisy-bloom 

Left by the reapers to the gathering gloom, 

The star of twilight glows, — as Ruth, 'tis told, 

Dreamed homesick 'mid the harvest fields of old, 

The Dusk goes gleaning color and perfume 

From Bible slopes of heaven, that illume 

Her pensive beauty deep in shadows stoled. 

Hushed is the forest ; and blue vale and hill 

Are still, save for the brooklet, sleepily 

Stumbling the stone with one foam-fiuttering foot : 

Save for the note of one far whippoorwill. 

And in my heart her name, — Hke some sweet bee 

Within a rose, — blowing a faery flute. 



284 



THE WINDS 

Those hewers of the clouds, the Winds, — that lair 

At the four compass-points, — are out to-night ; 

I hear their sandals trample on the height, 

I hear their voices trumpet through the air : 

Builders of storm, God's workmen, now they bear, 

Up the steep stair of sky, on backs of might. 

Huge tempest bulks, while, — sweat that blinds their 

sight, — 
The rain is shaken from tumultuous hair : 
Now, sweepers of the firmament, they broom, 
Like gathered dust, the rolhng mists along 
Heaven's floors of sapphire ; all the beautiful blue 
Of skyey corridor and celestial room 
Preparing, with large laughter and loud song, 
For the white moon and stars to wander through. 



285 



LIGHT AND WIND 

Where, through the myriad leaves of forest trees, 

The dayhght falls, beryl and chrysoprase, 

The glamour and the glimmer of its rays 

Seem visible music, tangible melodies : 

Light that is music ; music that one sees — 

Wagnerian music — where forever sways 

The spirit of romance, and gods and fays 

Take form, clad on with dreams and mysteries. 

And now the wind's transmuting necromance 

Touches the light and makes it fall and rise, 

Vocal, a harp of multitudinous waves 

That speaks as ocean speaks — an utterance 

Of far-off whispers, mermaid-murmuring sighs — 

Pelagian, vast, deep down in coral caves, 



286 



ENCHANTMENT 

The deep seclusion of this forest path, — 

O'er which the green boughs weave a canopy ; 

Along which bluet and anemone 

Spread dim a carpet ; where the Twilight hath 

Her cool abode ; and, sweet as aftermath. 

Wood-fragrance roams, — has so enchanted me, 

That yonder blossoming bramble seems to be 

A Sylvan resting, rosy from her bath : 

Has so enspelled me with tradition's dreams, 

That every foam-white stream that, twinkling, flows, 

And every bird that flutters wings of tan, 

Or warbles hidden, to my fancy seems 

A Naiad dancing to a Faun who blows 

Wild woodland music on the pipes of Pan. 



287 



ABANDONED 

The hornets build in plaster-dropping rooms, 

And on its mossy porch the lizard lies ; 

Around its chimneys slow the swallow flies, 

And on its roof the locusts snow their blooms. 

Like some sad thought that broods here, old perfumes 

Haunt its dim stairs ; the cautious zephyr tries 

Each gusty door, like some dead hand, then sighs 

With ghostly lips among the attic glooms. 

And now a heron, now a kingfisher. 

Flits in the willows where the riffle seems 

At each faint fall to hesitate to leap. 

Fluttering the silence with a Uttle stir. 

Here Summer seems a placid face asleep. 

And the near world a figment of her dreams. 



288 



AFTER LONG GRIEF 

There is a place hung o'er of summer boughs 
And dreamy skies wherein the gray hawk sleeps ; 
Where water flows, within whose lazy deeps, 
Like silvery prisms where the sunbeams drowse, 
The minnows twinkle ; where the bells of cows 
Tinkle the stillness ; and the bobwhite keeps 
Calling from meadows where the reaper reaps, 
And children's laughter haunts an oldtime house : 
A place where life wears ever an honest smell 
Of hay and honey, sun and elder-bloom, — 
Like some sweet, simple girl, — within her hair ; 
WTiere, with our love for comrade, we may dwell 
Far from the city's strife, whose cares consume. - 
Oh, take my hand and let me lead you there. 



289 



MENDICANTS 

Bleak, in dark rags of clouds, the day begins, 

That passed so splendidly but yesterday. 

Wrapped in magnificence of gold and gray. 

And poppy and rose. Now, burdened as with sins. 

Their wildness clad in fogs, like coats of skins. 

Tattered and streaked with rain ; gaunt, clogged with 

clay, 
The mendicant Hours take their somber way 
Westward o'er Earth, to which no sunray wins. 
Their splashing sandals ooze ; their foosteps drip. 
Puddle and brim with moisture ; their sad hair 
Is tagged with haggard drops, that with their eyes' 
Slow streams are blent ; each sullen fingertip 
Rivers ; while round them, in the grief-drenched air 
Wearies the wind of their perpetual sighs. 



290 



THE END OF SUMMER 

Pods are the poppies, and slim spires of pods 

The hollyhocks ; the balsam's pearly bredes 

Of rose-stained snow are little sacs of seeds 

Collapsing at a touch : the lote, that sods 

The pond with green, has changed its flowers to rods 

And discs of vesicles ; and all the weeds, 

Around the sleepy water and its reeds, 

Are one white smoke of seeded silk that nods. 

Summer is dead, ay me ! sweet Summer's dead ! 

The sunset clouds have built her funeral pyre, 

Through which, e'en now, runs subterranean fire : 

While from the east, as from a garden bed, 

Mist-vined, the Dusk Hfts her broad moon — like some 

Great golden melon — saying, ''Fall has come." 



291 



NOVEMBER 



The shivering wind sits in the oaks, whose limbs, 
Twisted and tortured, nevermore are still ; 
Grief and decay sit with it ; they, whose chill 
Autumnal touch makes hectic-red the rims 
Of all the oak leaves ; desolating, dims 
The ageratum's blue that banks the rill ; 
And splits the milkweed's pod upon the hill, 
And shakes it free of the last seed that swims. 
Down goes the day despondent to its close : 
And now the sunset's hands of copper build 
A tower of brass, behind whose burning bars 
The day, in fierce, barbarian repose. 
Like some imprisoned Inca sits, hate-filled, 
Crowned with the gold corymbus of the stars. 

II 

There is a booming in the forest boughs ; 
Tremendous feet seem trampling through the trees 
The storm is at his wildman revelries, 
And earth and heaven echo his carouse. 
292 



NOVEMBER 293 

Night reels with tumult ; and, from out her house 

Of cloud, the moon looks, — like a face one sees 

In nightmare, — hurrying, with pale eyes that freeze 

Stooping above with white, malignant brows. 

The isolated oak upon the hill. 

That seemed, at sunset, in terrific lands 

A Titan head black in a sea of blood, 

Now seems a monster harp, whose wild strings thrill 

To the vast fingering of innumerable hands — 

Spirits of tempest and of solitude. 



THE DEATH OF LOVE 

So Love is dead, the Love we knew of old ! 

And in the sorrow of our hearts' hushed halls 

A lute lies broken and a flower falls ; 

Love's house stands empty and his hearth lies cold. 

Lone in dim places, where sweet vows were told, 

In walks grown desolate, by ruined walls 

Beauty decays ; and on their pedestals 

Dreams crumble and th' immortal gods are mold. 

Music is slain or sleeps ; one voice alone, 

One voice awakes, and like a wandering ghost 

Haunts all the echoing chambers of the Past — 

The voice of Memory, that stills to stone 

The soul that hears ; the mind, that, utterly lost, 

Before its beautiful presence stands aghast. 



294 



UNANSWERED 

How long ago it is since we went Maying ! 
Since she and I went Maying long ago ! — 
The years have left my forehead lined, I know, 
Have thinned my hair around the temples graying. 
Ah, time will change us : yea, I hear it saying — 
" She too grows old : the face of rose and snow 
Has lost its freshness : in the hair's brown glow 
Some strands of silver sadly, too, are straying. 
The form you knew, whose beauty so enspelled, 
Has lost the litheness of its loveliness : 
And all the gladness that her blue eyes held 
Tears and the world have hardened with distress." — 
"True ! true I " I answer, " O ye years that part ! 
These things are changed — but is her heart, her 
heart?" 



295 



THE SWASHBUCKLER 

Squat-nosed and broad, of big and pompous port ; 

A tavern visage, apoplexy haunts. 

All pimple-puffed : the Falstaff-like resort 

Of fat debauchery, whose veined cheek flaunts 

A flabby purple : rusty-spurred he stands 

In rakehell boots and belt, and hanger that 

Claps when, with greasy gauntlets on his hands, 

He swaggers past in cloak and slouch-plumed hat. 

Aggression marches armies in his words ; 

And in his oaths great deeds ride cap-a-pie ; 

His looks, his gestures breathe the breath of swords ; 

And in his carriage camp all wars to be : — 

With him, of battles there shall be no lack 

While buxom wenches are and stoops of sack. 



296 



OLD SIR JOHN 

Bald, with old eyes a blood-shot blue, he comes 
Into the Boar's Head Inn : the hot sweat streaks 
His fulvous face, and all his raiment reeks 
Of all the stews and all the Eastcheap slums. 
Upon the battered board again he drums 
And croaks for sack : then sits, his harsh-haired cheeks 
Sunk in his hands, rough with the grime of weeks. 
While round the tap one great bluebottle hums. 
All, all are gone, the old companions — they 
Who made his rogue's world merry : of them all 
Not one is left. Old, toothless now, and gray. 
Alone he waits : the swagger of that day 
Gone from his bulk — departed even as Doll, 
And he, his Hal, who broke his heart, they say. 



297 



UNCALLED 

As one, who, journeying westward with the sun, 
Beholds at length from the up- towering hills, 
Far-off, a land unspeakable beauty fills, 
Circean peaks and vales of Avalon : 
And, sinking weary, watches, one by one, 
The big seas beat between ; and knows it skills 
No more to try ; that now, as Heaven wills. 
This is the helpless end, that all is done : 
So 'tis with him, whom long a vision led 
In quest of Beauty ; and who finds at last 
She lies beyond his effort ; all the waves 
Of all the world between them : while the dead, 
The myriad dead, who people all the past 
With failure, hail him from forgotten graves. 



298 



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The Book of Love 

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